The Good 'Ol Post-War Family Life
by can-it-fly
Summary: "Fury's words echoed in Steve's ears: "Got a lead on the Winter Soldier. Baltimore, on the harbor. She pawned the missing scientist's things night before last." / The assistant director hadn't said anything about the Winter Soldier being, well, Steve's wife. / His dead wife, to be exact."
1. Chapter 1

_This is a genderbend AU with the same concept as Lost Sight of Shore – equal rights acts passed during the Great Depression, so by the time the 2000s roll around gender equality is pretty much ingrained into society. (It's idealistic, sue me.)_

 _General warnings for: untreated depression, past rape, past forced pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, depersonalization and general violence. Anything graphic will be summarized in end notes._

 _Updates on Thursdays._

* * *

This time, it wasn't the asset's fault that the breeding failed. How could it be, when Pierce had shackled its hands to the head of the bed, and its feet spread wide at the base? – and who could forget the shock collar that kept it from falling into unconsciousness?

No, the breeding failed because Pierce was old and proud: she wouldn't let anyone else fuck it but her pet agents. She declared a disgusted defeat after four months – four whole months! – and dispatched the asset back to cryo.

Pierce was old and proud: she'd bound it to prevent the freedom of movement that had killed most previous breeding efforts, but she forgot all of Zola's other notes. She forgot to administer stimulants to prevent a light unconscious state the asset had learned over years of shocks; she forgot to order a wipe before cryo; she forgot to institute higher security measures in the cryo facility.

Her mistakes. Not its.

* * *

She waved goodbye to the other techs on the tarmac and plodded off towards the parking lot, where the car would be parked. The others had commiserated that she alone didn't have a chartered ride back to the office. No, she'd go home, kiss her wife and child and write her debrief tomorrow.

That wouldn't happen; she'd write no debrief.

She waited a couple hours to leave. The other techs, when their comrade was reported missing tomorrow, would explain the discrepancy as a nap: she'd slept on the flight home but it was a rough ride – undoubtedly she was still tired, and didn't want to fall asleep at the wheel.

In reality she searched the phone for information on her location, the weather, the date, the news.

A hundred and thirty-two minutes later she started the car, set the GPS for "home" and placed a pair of sunglasses over her eyes. She scanned out of the parking lot with her ID and turned her head so that the camera would capture the least amount of her face.

The car had heating, something she treasured deeply, but she kept the temperature low and winter jacket covering her chin and mouth as she followed the GPS through backroads. All bases such as these stayed away from developments to avoid detection but were never that far from cities.

Cities meant poverty, meant lack of police, meant crime.

She pulled off the highway and parked under the overpass. She found a nail on the road and jammed it into one of the tires, smashed in the driver's side window and took the emergency $200 in the glove box before walking away into the dark.

The car would be picked clean by morning, if this neighborhood was as poor as the phone had told her. She'd been poor once, in her past life. She'd eaten soup more water than broth, stolen from the markets and filched the wallets of fellows when they opened them to pay for the five minutes she'd given them on her knees.

Poor people weren't bad, just unlucky, and they did what they had to survive.

She exchanged the clothes with a set from a donations box. The phone she pawned for $150, glasses for $60, watch $280 and jewelry $135, and split the proceeds with the boy with an infected gunshot wound who went into the pawn shop for her. He looked at her arm for longer than she liked but scampered off soon enough when she gave him an extra $40.

Maybe she should cover herself before day broke. Sleeves over the metal arm were uncomfortable but the loose jacket she found in a return trip to the clothes box didn't impede her motion unnecessarily – and besides, what would she be doing with the killing arm? For once in this life she wasn't out in the world on a mission.

Day broke and her stomach growled. She bought breakfast from a diner, something her past life had loved to do, and walked around the tall buildings eating street-vendor hot dogs. Without a mission time stretched on into infinity; by the time night fell she'd ridden buses the length of the city five times.

She settled down behind a dumpster and the sleep she'd gotten in breeding paled in comparison to the cold, hard concrete.

In the morning she found a church, because something during the night had recovered more of those past-life memories, but she didn't know what she was supposed to do and left. She caught a glimpse of the boy from the pawn shop – playing truant, she'd never done that but her best friend had – when she bought lunch, tacos, from a vendor.

Tacos were better than hot dogs. Much better. More flavors, more choices – oh, how she loved choices.

She made a promise, a choice, that tomorrow would be the last day. The morning afterwards she'd walk back to the base, enjoying the stillness of the woods, and turn herself in. But these three days were hers and hers alone.

She didn't last three days.

During the afternoon she sat at the harbor, on the steps looking out into the bay. A musician played for tips behind her, songs she didn't know but knew she loved, and she left a twenty in the woman's cup when she left to hunker down for the night.

Routines were bad but last night's dumpster resided in a surveillance-free zone and her training prioritized the latter. Still, she pulled a corner of dumpster back towards the wall and left herself a triangle-slice of space: one entrance, one exit, and unremarkable in this corner of the alley.

The ground was cold, again, but now it bothered her. She took far too long to fall asleep.

She woke when the dumpster shifted. Her little sliver of an exit slammed shut as the figure opened up the other end of her triangle.

She didn't resist; she'd not meant to escape, after all. No matter how many times the handlers called her "it" she knew she was human, and humans couldn't go too long cooped up. Pierce had kept her in her bedroom, agents pounding into her for four months, and she couldn't resist the impulse to taste the outside world.

A woman was dead because of her. Not for any greater good, just because she couldn't follow fucking standing orders. She'd just wanted to feel the sun on her face, wind biting her cheeks, water running down her throat from something other than a waterboarding session.

Whatever hell there was to pay for this, it had been worth it.

A needle pinched her neck and the world fell into darkness.

* * *

Fury's words echoed in Steve's ears: "Got a lead on the Winter Soldier. Baltimore, on the harbor. She pawned the missing scientist's things night before last."

The assistant director hadn't said anything about the Winter Soldier being, well, Steve's wife.

His dead wife, to be exact.

Fury sent a tech with him, a biochem student from the Science Academy with wide bright eyes who enthusiastically explained to him how her sedative would affect the legendary assassin-slash-spy he was supposed to track down. Not-an-agent Simmons took the mission very seriously and insisted on going over every detail before Captain Rogers met up with Fury's tail.

"Why don't you have Barton track her down?" he'd asked, when given the assignment. "I'm not a spy. She'll make me in seconds."

"Barton's on assignment. And the intel on the Soldier tells us she's as strong as you. You're the only one who stands a chance," replied Fury. She handed him the folder and added, " 'sides, I already have someone tailing her, and she hasn't made him yet."

What Fury didn't say was that Barton had only been recruited three years ago and hadn't proved himself trustworthy enough yet. Steve read between the lines on that, and for the admission that she trusted the man out of time, only in this century for six months, over a seasoned operative.

Okay then.

The tail, a teenage boy almost as thin as Steve had been growing up, approached him at the appointed meeting place and time. "Not bad," commented the kid, "but you still stand out."

"Is it 'cuz I'm white?" Steve asked.

"And you're not dressed right. But otherwise I wouldn't'a figured it was you. Least with the beard."

Ah yes, the beard: a remnant of the two weeks he was too depressed to get out of bed, let alone shave, and Fury took one look at his face once he'd pulled himself together and said, "Keep it. Barton can train you in espionage."

His first non-combat mission, and this was bound to be his last. Hell, he was probably going to retire after all this to take care of Jamie. At least he had the backpay money for it.

Steve and the tail conversed for a few minutes about poverty, neglected city neighborhoods and how yes, he really should take the $500 Steve offered to take care of that gunshot wound because he shouldn't trust Fury to take care of him, not when she had him stick to a tail instead of going to the hospital. The tail swapped with Steve, money for a little map and diagram: alley with a dumpster.

The Winter Soldier had hunkered down behind the dumpster, positioning it so no one would've thought anything off about it unless they were looking. Steve confirmed it was her by the metal arm – she didn't stir when he pushed her sleeve back, her other arm flung over her face – before shifting the dumpster and dragging her out to administer the sedative.

She didn't fight him, didn't even tense at the needle to her throat.

Steve checked her pulse, removed the weapons he could find and carried her like a baby to the waiting car. He didn't look down until they passed under a street light, and –

And his world fell apart.

Simmons, to her credit, only stuttered for a few seconds when she caught sight of the woman in Captain Rogers' arms. She helped him slide the assassin into the back seat of their truck and cuff her, and climbed into the front to drive them back to the safehouse.

The windows were tinted; Steve didn't bother to cover Jamie's arm with a blanket or hide her face against his leg as he cradled her head. He leaned against the backseat door and watched Simmons drive a winding path around the city.

He carried his wife inside the safehouse.

"I need to do a physical exam," Simmons said.

"And?"

"You need to consent."

"Why?"

"Because, legally..."

She stuttered to a stop at Steve's stare. "We kidnapped her," he told her. "This isn't legal."

"We're SHIELD agents," she insisted, "and she's unconscious so I need you to consent to my exam."

Steve looked down at the bed, the sleeping assassin on it, and nodded. "Okay."

An exam had always been the plan, after all. He had no problem with it now. Nothing had changed.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve pounded on the table separating him from his wife and she finally opened her eyes. The worry he caught in her expression vanished as quickly as it appeared and she settled into a vacant, relaxed position.

She'd slept for three days, kept unconscious with a steady IV drip of sedatives and calorie-rich sugar water. Simmons performed every test she could with the resources in their safehouse – actually a police station abandoned and hidden behind new storefronts – and talked on in-depth on her findings, concluding:

"Heavily tortured and malnourished, with evidence of experimentation and recent miscarriages. There is also scarring on her temples and forehead akin to electrical burns but I found no signs of recent trauma to the area."

"Okay," Steve replied after a long moment. "Keep stalling with Fury."

"You're – you aren't an interrogator. SHIELD procedure –"

"I don't give a fuck about procedure."

Simmons had pursed her lips, gave a stiff nod and walked off to notify Fury that, no, Captain Rogers hadn't found the Winter Soldier yet. He was still tracking down leads but it would take a while to locate someone who'd evaded the best intelligence agencies for sixty years.

"Do you know where you are?" he asked.

Jamie breathed slowly, evenly, without a sound. She looked like the opposite of a threat.

Steve couldn't think of her as a threat. Even with that metal arm – probably custom-built, optimized to be as lethal as possible – and the empty face and the way she pretended she hadn't analyzed every speck of the room, he couldn't.

"Do you know why you're here?"

She wasn't cuffed; undoubtedly she could overpower him and leave. If she'd escaped, why hadn't she fought him in the alley? If she was in the middle of a mission, why would she think it okay for someone to drag her in?

"Just tell me why you escaped." _How you got out, who had you, who did this to you. Who left so many scars on your skin._

Jamie parted her lips and said, "The breeding took so long, and – it just..."

In his ear, Simmons whispered, "I found no evidence of recent childbirth when I examined her, vaginally or in her x-rays. Only miscarriages, all in the first trimester. Unsurprising considering how malnourished she is."

Steve remembered, just soon enough, not to reply that he and Jamie had buried five babies born too early to live: three before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, another two days before she got the draft letter and one while they were on leave in 1944.

Jamie bowed her head. "I wasn't let out at all. Usually, before storage, there's a mission, but not this time and – I know it was wrong but I had to go outside. I just wanted to see the sun." She caught herself, swallowed and added, "Ready for storage."

"Not before you answer some questions."

She nodded.

"How long was... how long did breeding take?"

Oh, but saying that word made Steve wither inside.

"Four months."

"Walk me through standard procedure."

Jamie rattled off the horrible, clinical steps to her forced reproduction: tied down to the floor or a bed, serum injected into her ovaries and left to stew for two hours before some painful process to induce ovulation. Simmons stuffed knuckles into her mouth before Jamie finished explaining how she'd be raped for five days straight before they did a blood test. Steve stuck to clutching his fingers almost to the breaking point.

She continued at his prompting: wiping procedure, basic mission procedure, experiments –

"You don't work for Pierce."

"No. Pierce's position isn't high enough for me," he replied.

Simmons: "Who's Pierce?"

Pierce could be a number of people.

"Has she sold me?" she asked Steve.

Simmons gasped.

Honestly, he couldn't say he was surprised. Steve had worked with Clint Barton a few times, a man who'd daylighted as a circus performer while breaking kneecaps and necks for the highest bidder on the side. Clint never saw any of the money, though – his handlers were the only ones keeping his brother from dying from the poison they'd injected him with one afternoon. Barney collapsed in the bathroom and the handlers had owned Clint Barton ever since.

Then Barney Barton shot himself in the head, Clint went freelance on the run and SHIELD brought him in on the night the ball dropped and Y2K was averted. As Clint liked to say, what a time to be alive.

"What do you think?"

Jamie's eyes flared, another split-second show of personality that she clamped down on in a matter of seconds. "You work for Malick."

Now _there_ was a name Steve could work with.

"Why do you think that?"

"Only one with more foreign influence than an ambassador is a member of the World Security Council."

Still as sharp as ever, Jamie was.

"How much did you pay?"

Steve leaned forward and countered, "Why do you want to know?"

She winced. Steve forced himself to stay calm, keep his expression clear like he'd learned to do in the days that Congress grilled him over why, exactly, he was swimming against every politician and telling people not to support the invasion of Iraq.

Nothing like being thrown into 21st-century paranoid politics to make Captain America cynical about the world.

"An asset has no wants," Jamie said. The words sounded like rote memorization.

"How much did Pierce pay?"

"Forty-five million US."

He whistled. "That's low."

"The iron curtain fell," she explained. "The KGB liquidated."

"When?"

"Nineteen ninety-two."

"Then that wasn't the only thing that pushed the price down."

Jamie went stiff.

She knew, obviously. Everyone knew the mistake she'd made when she killed the Starks – it was how the Winter Soldier moved from intelligence legend to well-known covert assassin.

"What did you do wrong?"

"I don't know."

"What was it?"

"I don't –!" she said harshly, and checked herself quickly. "I don't know."

"Do you want to know?"

"An asset has no wants."

"Their son was sleeping in the back seat. He fell on the floor when the car crashed. Saw the whole thing. It stayed in the papers for five months."

Whatever light her eyes held died.

Steve walked her through five "sample" missions: examples of her skill sets. She was capable of espionage as well as close- and long-range assassination and the infiltration mission she recounted involved a Black Widow.

Clint Barton, interestingly enough, had his own Black Widow. He chased his, though – she didn't make his face up before walking through a German disco.

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked after the last tale – long-range sniper, and Simmons whispered that the setup sounded suspiciously like the Kennedy assassination.

"What do you think I'm going to do?"

Her minute emotion was frustration, irritation. "Disciple for unauthorized departure from base, harm done to maintenance staff..." She lowered her head. "Consumption."

"Of?"

The irritation spread to her voice: " _Food_."

Simmons: "That would explain the malnutrition."

"And after that's done?"

"Storage."

"Nothing before that?"

There was no way that the KGB, or whoever the hell controlled her now, could've kept her compliant without some kind of memory suppression. The person sitting in front of Steve now didn't act anything like how Jamie usually acted but he didn't think this was someone other than the pulverized remains of his wife's personality. He'd watched her slide towards dead-eyed calm every time she picked up a sniper rifle on the war front, after all.

Steve knew his wife. If she had the slightest clue that what she was doing was wrong, that she could stop it from happening, she would fight.

Jamie nodded. "Wiping prior to storage, if ordered by the master handler."

"Can anyone else order that?"

"Mental wipes are only to be used when necessary. Physical punishment recommended for obedience reinforcing instead."

"Why is that?"

"Overuse of mental wipes can compromise field efficacy."

"And what happens then?"

She winced and her lip quivered. Her body relaxed – overrelaxed, he knew that habit of hers well – and Steve understood he was pushing.

"What happens?"

Her lips formed a straight, shaking line.

Steve sighed, leaned forwards and the word just slipped out: "Jamie..."

She froze.

And, fuck.

"Jamie."

"Hail Hydra," she whispered.

"Jamie!"

Her mouth shook but she kept on: "Hail Hydra, immortal Hydra. We shall never be destroyed. Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place. I serve none but the Master, just as the world shall soon serve us. Hail Hydra!"

Oh.

* * *

Twelve hours later, Steve poured his fifth shot of 190-proof vodka for Nicola Fury and asked her how well she knew Alexandra Pierce. She downed it and told him they went back to the 80s, some embassy brouhaha, why was he asking?

"How much do you know about Arnim Zola?"

She slurred out, "Paperclip – operation, forty s– eight, didn't like – Carter – why?"

Steve led her tottering to the interrogation room. It took her nearly five minutes to place the woman on the other side of the one-way mirror, another couple to connect the prosthetic arm to Zola, to Hydra.

"Are you fucking – fucking – fucking 'course."

"How much of SHIELD is Hydra?"

"Hell if – if I – why're ya askin', what's –"

Fury stumbled where she stood and missed the wall trying to steady herself. Steve steadied her, looked her straight into her unfocused eyes and asked, "Did you know?"

"About wha'?"

"Hydra?"

"Everyone knows – collapsed with – war two, you killed..."

"Zola kept Hydra going. In SHIELD. Did you know that?"

"Nah. 'Splains – bad mission, 'curity fail – fired almost for it – Peg said no, don't. Fucking 'splains it."

From around the corner Simmons whispered, "I think we should let her sleep. She doesn't know anything," and Steve relented.

Fury called Tony Stark in the next morning. Steve disagreed but his boss threatened to go up to the World Security Council, Malick included, and he was forced to relent.

"I was right, it's a chick."

"Stark..."

"Height's right. Profile too, 'cept for the boobs. She didn't have those."

"Stark."

"A binder, maybe?" He cocked his head. "But that wouldn't work with the arm – where's it welded? Has to be welded, it moves with her skin –"

"The metal is approximately two millimeters thick," Simmons contributed. "I believe Zola anchored the plates deeply into the dermis of her shoulder."

"Right, so he stripped the skin, cauterized the glands – freezing? I'd freeze them. Freeze and everything goes kaput. Then – take the humerus out, wire the nervous system and fry baby fry till the wires melt into muscle –"

"Stark," Steve said a third time, and this time he put a threat into it.

"I've had twelve years to work out how Manchurian Candidate in there got a near-perfect prosthetic. My time has come. Doc Thompkins said something about scans?"

Simmons stuttered something about how she wasn't a doctor to superheroes but left to find the files; Stark followed on Fury's insistence.

"Obviously she associates something with her name," said Fury, reversed the recording on the screen and froze on Jamie in the split seconds after Steve said her name. "That's fear. She's afraid of whatever she thinks you're going to do to her."

He knew that expression: dart-eyed, lowered brows, tense face and deliberately slow breathing. Jamie got that way when she saw a threat to herself. Anyone else under fire and she'd attack, but if someone tried to take something away from her she'd let them land a few punches if it meant they didn't know how to get at what she really valued.

"They tied her down and left her – well, not alone but enough, for four months, she might've started remembering..."

"Chances are Zola tried to erase her identity. Every account we have of her, she has the mask on. If no one knows how she is –"

"She thought I was Hydra. If I knew maybe I'd try to use that against her somehow. Force her to –"

"Rogers."

Right, interrupting: Fury's pet peeve. "Sorry."

"She remembers who she is. Her memories of you should be just as strong."

"So... what do you want me to do?"

"Remind her who you are."

"How?"

Fury gave him one of her patented figure-it-out looks.

"Okay."

He passed Simmons and Stark – they were debating the prosthetic's power source – in the hallway and shushed them before opening the door to the interrogation room. Inside Jamie sat rock-still, staring at nothing, refusing to betray that she hadn't gotten any kind of food or energy in almost a day.

Based on Simmons' findings, a single day of deprivation would be hardly anything for Jamie anymore.

"Do you know who I am?"

She shook her head.

"Do you know who you are?"

"The asset."

"Do you know who you were?"

If her mouth could form an even straighter line than it already had, it did.

"He died," she said steadily. "So who are you?"

"I'm exactly who you think I am."

"I'm compliant. Obedient. You don't –"

She cut off.

"I don't what?"

There was that lip quiver again. "I will not resist breeding. Pretending – pretending to be someone... from – there's no point. No need."

Steve stood – no response, verbal or otherwise – and pulled one of the chains off his neck. He placed it down on the table in front of her and waited.

It felt like forever, but finally she looked down at the tags. She moved her hand oh-so-slowly to finger the little glittering ring that hung off the tag chain, run her thumb across the letters stamped onto her tags – words Steve already knew by heart: "JAMES B BARNES / 32557038 T42 43 AB / STEVEN ROGERS / 45 MIDDAGH ST / BKLN NYC NY C"

He reached into his shirt and pulled out his own tags. He put them, and his own ring, in a pile next to Jamie's and she shook her head.

"No," she said. "He died."

"So did you."

"That's not his ring."

"No?" Steve pinched it between in his thumb and first finger, careful not to crush the delicate gold, and showed off the words inside – words that should have worn down over the years his father wore it, except his father came home in a box when Steve was ten months old and the ring sat in his mother's jewelry box until it was the last unsold piece there.

The words: "Patrick and Sarah, oceans apart but together in spirit, 1917". They'd gotten married when he was on furlough, about to ship off to the trenches of Europe, and Steve never had the heart or money to have it re-engraved with his and Jamie's names and wedding year.

He handed the ring to Jamie and she took it, face stony still but eyes narrowed. Next he picked up her ring with the chain to display the stamped letters: "MB & TS, 1916".

Mihail Bărnuțiu and Tereza Stefoniou, married four months before Jamie was born. Tereza almost died but held on through another seven pregnancies until the last one killed her with an infection.

Jamie replaced Steve's ring for her own in her hands and bent her head down to inspect it.

"They made me – I had to keep it off. For the cameras."

"After a while you stopped wearing it altogether. You didn't want to lose the stones."

She looked up and met his gaze. "What did I do with it?"

In his ear, Fury whispered, "She's testing you. She already knows the answer."

Yeah, Steve could tell that for his own damn self. "You kept it on a chain with your dog tags, but you never wore them either – you hated the feel of 'em. It was against regulation but I always carried them for you."

Jamie blinked once, twice, and told him, "You died."

"So did you."

"You drowned."

"It was the arctic, I froze. Apparently we can survive that."

She looked down. "I know."

"So that's how they stored – how you haven't..."

Jamie nodded, a jerky movement.

"Oh. Okay."

Steve bit his lip, tried to swallow his words but gave up. "I swear, Jamie. I'm not Hydra. Whatever you think I'm gonna do, I won't."

"You told me –"

"I know what I made you think. I just needed to know who... who was calling the shots."

She blinked, again. "How long have you – they stay in the shadows. When did you find out about them?"

"When you said their motto," confessed Steve. "I never thought I'd hear it again."

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

Steve slumped back in his chair. The mental exhaustion hit him and his vision blurred, just for a split second before he refocused.

"What do you want to know?" asked Jamie.

Steve opened his mouth but the words wouldn't come. He didn't know where to start – get the history of her handlers, sketch out every face she remembered, detail missions – how she'd survived the fall off the train – but he didn't want to let Fury take over. She would just scare Jamie back into silence.

When was the last time she'd eaten? – come to think of it, when was the last time _he'd_ eaten?

"The tail we had on you said you went to a bunch of food trucks. Which one is best?"

After some coaxing Jamie recommended the tacos. Simmons got sent out with a shopping bag and a $50 bill, returning with twenty foil-wrapped tacos that Steve inhaled almost as fast as Jamie did.

* * *

 _Because this is set about 10 years before CAWS (2003 instead of 2014), some of the characterizations are going to be...different. Fury is still climbing the SHIELD hierarchy, for example, not at the top, and she hasn't pinned down the tact that Fury in the movies has. Barton is more talkative, doesn't have kids and is only a few years removed from the circus.  
_


	3. Chapter 3

_Have an early chapter, since I'm getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow and am liable to forget to post this._

* * *

"That's the –" gasped Jamie, "more up, top a' the cunt – shit that's –"

She moaned, her legs kicking and sliding against the sheets. Steve thrust into her quickly now, counterpointing his slow pushes from the minutes before, and adjusted his angle to get more friction out of the condom.

Steve came. His arms gave – this was their fifth round tonight, even his stamina had limits – and it was all he could do not to fall on her too hard. Automatically his hand reached down to rub around her clitoris in one of her favorite patterns, enough to push her over the edge.

He calmed down just as her moans turned into gasps, heavy pants, and Steve checked himself for injuries. They were common for both of them now, when they had sex, but if they treated them fast enough no one was the wiser.

No injuries, but the condom felt loose. He moved around a little and felt a distinctly different sort of smooth, wet on his side, which could only mean –

Shit.

Steve withdrew but Jamie grabbed his hip, mouthing "no", and he held himself in her. She didn't trust him to do what she wanted, and the physical way she asserted herself – keeping her legs tight around his waist, for example – Steve found odd. She still had problems disobeying orders so why would she feel comfortable ordering him around?

Well, no one could argue he understood his wife. Fury certainly didn't; she acted like Jamie wanted to be cooped up in this house bought by Stark's AI and secured – supervised – by Stark's closed-system monitoring.

His phone beeped – and again, again, oh great it was ringing. Jamie kept her hand firm on his hip but he managed to snag it from the nightstand and answered.

"So there's this new book out about us – it's like seven mini biographies, 'cept it's six 'cuz they combined yours and Jamie's – anyway, it's great 'cuz it looks at the propaganda reels and that one where Frenchie has to clean her knife on her pants, they spend three whole pages on it –"

"Jim," Steve panted, "now's not a good time."

A pause, then, "Are you having sex?"

Jamie gave him an odd look, confused, and he remembered she could hear Jim through the tiny phone speakers.

"Uh..."

"Good for you. It's about time. Who is she? Or he, y'know I always thought the way you looked at Lieutenant –"

"She's not – it's just sex, okay?" Steve stammered, and winced because there Jamie went hiding her facial expression like she always did.

"That's fine, you aren't ready for commitment yet. I get that. Are you still wearing your wedding ring? No, everyone knows who you are, they'd understand."

"I'm gonna hang up now."

"...Well if it's just sex then she probably doesn't care –"

"I'll call you back in an hour, okay?"

"Fine. Have fun. Be safe. Make good –"

Steve hung up. He nuzzled Jamie's neck and told her, "I didn't mean it. I was just trying to get him off the phone."

"I know." Jamie turned her head and met his mouth for a kiss. She let go of his hip and he pulled out, almost leaving the rubber inside.

Yes, this was definitely a problem.

Jamie broke off. "The condom broke."

"Yeah. We should think –"

"I _just_ had my period."

"It was two weeks ago."

She scowled but didn't bother echoing her words from earlier in the evening: _What day is it? I don't know. I remember different days were supposed to feel different but hell if I know. It feels like I've been stuck in this damn house for too long._

It was for her own safety that she stayed inside; she knew that, and Steve bore her complaints and eased her discomfort the best he could. Once the doctor cleared her physically, and the shrink mentally, then Fury would start talking about some sort of concealed outside activity. It was condescending as hell but even Steve admitted that in a lot of ways Jamie still hadn't gotten herself together.

Sure, she could act the part: she cooked every recipe she found online, read all the books Steve brought by on his weekends and break days, chose clothes to buy online and exercised a consistent four hours a day. She learned five languages and enough advanced math to race Tony Stark in solving equations; she brought Steve's phone back to life after he threw it against a wall in frustration.

But she still froze if he said the wrong phrase, or used the wrong tone – hell, if he did anything not on her list of okay actions. She recovered her flinch instinct and Steve learned that his calming touches outside the bedroom made her miserable; inside she kept him close, unused to someone gentle on top of her.

"I can get the morning-after pill for you," Steve suggested. "It's good for seventy –"

Jamie shook her head. "If it comes, it comes. We're Catholic, right? Life begins at conception, all that?"

That was bullshit. It was an act of rebellion, Steve knew – seizing control over whatever she could.

She was making progress – the psychiatrist, vetted by Stark and Fury for two straight weeks, assured them both of it. But none of that mattered anymore: Jamie was pregnant. The two missed periods, four plus signs on the tests and an ultrasound confirmed it.

She'd only had two periods, after three months too malnourished for her body to think about reproducing. Hydra had had to stimulate ovulation and cross their fingers that the fertilized egg would attach itself to her uterus.

Fury arranged for the Strike team to transfer to Duluth, Minnesota. Steve and Jamie moved into the basement of a SHIELD lawyer and his husband, an agent retired from the field by a bout of super-pneumonia that left him wheezing. The couple had a five-month-old baby and Fury cleared them to be included in this little conspiracy; the cover was that they decided to adopt after having one biologically their own.

Except for everything, it was just like they'd always dreamed of: go home after the war was done, buy a house somewhere that Jones and Dugan would hate them for because it was so damn cold, raise a family and keep a low profile.

Never mind that Jamie couldn't leave the house.

Steve drove his things up in a U-Haul truck and knocked on the house's front door. "Hi!" said the man who answered the door – Chinese, sharp face, hair down to his neck, a baby clutching at his chest. "I'm Jason. My husband's Tyler, he's at work right now. Come on in. She's in the basement."

"Thanks."

Jamie unpacked the bedroom while Steve and Jason brought the boxes in. There wasn't much, most of it Steve's unwanted tchotchkes that the Barnes family had saved, and Jamie's clothes. She window-browsed online too much.

Steve finished making a list of things to buy for the kitchen and found Jamie sitting on the bed with a pile of old photo albums. She ran her fingers over a black-and-white picture of her family: Jamie standing next to her mother, who had little Pete in her arms but still couldn't hide the baby bump that would be Becca, and her father stood behind them both and held Frank.

"I don't – I remember this," she said quietly. "But I don't feel anything about it."

Steve sat down next to her on the bed. "It's the last picture of your mom. Before Becca was born." _Before she died getting her into the world_.

"Were we happy?"

"I dunno," Steve confessed. "It was so long ago. I only met your mom a few times, I didn't spend a lot of time at your place a lot until..."

Until he was eighteen and she was going to help him with art school homework and instead showed up drunk and furious at her newly-ex-boyfriend for letting another girl take him in her mouth. Her dad worked nights on top of his day job as a carpenter and her aunt slept in her own rented room next door so no one stopped Steve from falling into bed with his best friend.

Jamie turned the page: their high school graduation, delayed by the year she'd taken off to make rent money. Her dad was so happy she went back for senior year he got a picture taken of her – Steve right next to her, obviously – after the ceremony.

Steve told her that story, and the next one and the next and only choked once they got to their wedding photo. "We didn't bother with a ceremony," he explained, "we didn't have the money. We talked to Father Caffrey and said our vows during Sunday mass."

"We should've saved up for new clothes but your mom didn't want us to wait. She wanted..."

 _Don't touch her don't put your hand on her shoulder don't do it she'd in a good mood don't ruin –_

Jamie cleared her throat. "She wanted to see us married 'fore she died."

She turned the page, looking past a happy photo of herself at four months pregnant – "you miscarried, uh, the week after I took this" – and into the war years: a picture of her at work welding an airplane together, before she was drafted, that made it onto the second page of the New York Times.

The album ended soon after, and Steve fetched the next one: a collection of candid and posed shots that Dugan, the group photographer, took when they weren't on missions and distributed for his teammates to send back to their families. The first time Steve saw Rebecca, a month after he woke up in 2003, she'd given both albums to him.

Jamie flipped through the photos and Steve recounted, "Dernier and Falsworth are dead – they're the oldest, I think Frenchie even remembered parts of the Great War. She was eight when they signed the armistice. Dugan, he smoked too much – lung cancer in the eighties. But before that he settled down with a sailor and married him the first chance he got. They adopted five kids.

"Jones went to college on the GI bill, desegregated Georgia Tech. She's still the doctor in some small town near where she was born – I've talked to her on the phone. Still makes jokes that'll get anyone to laugh. Morita..."

"His dad died."

"Yeah, in forty-two. Morita never got married. He's the famous uncle who'll outlast everyone else, or so he says. The only good explanation I got of modern politics I got it from him. It took him three hours to get through it all."

"He called you one time. I know, I knew his voice. He said you sounded like you'd just had sex."

"Well, I _had_."

She huffed a laugh, rubbed her six-months-full belly. "Food?"

"Oh, uh," spoke up Jason from the hallway – when had he come down the stairs? – "I made dinner – I'm betting you're hungry, 'specially..."

Jason's words faded as his eyes fell onto the couple on the bed but he recovered himself quickly. " 'Specially 'cuz you're expecting. C'mon up, we just put the pie in the oven."

"Steve hates pie," Jamie commented.

"Only if it's apple," added Steve hastily, when Jason's face fell. "Casualty of living in New York during the Depression. Apples were everywhere."

"Oh. That's why I thought... I can whip something else up."

"Don't worry about it."

Jason retreated with a comment that he and his husband would be ready to start eating whenever their new tenants were.

"You didn't have to tell him that," Steve said, pressing a kiss on his wife's head. "I would've eaten it."

Jamie muttered, "I thought we didn't have to do things we didn't want to," and shut the book. She slid off the bed and returned it to its place on the bookshelf, running her fingers along the binding and onto the third of their three photo albums: the war years, as told by propaganda photographers and Howard Stark's man Jarvis.

Steve followed her fingers down this binding with his own. "I was gonna be polite. Usually a good idea. Like it'd be a good idea not to make our landlords wait when they've made us dinner."

"So I don't have a choice."

"That's not – 'course you do. If you don't want to go I'll tell them you're having a bad day and bring you some food down here."

Jamie walked out of the room and up the stairs. Steve sighed and followed.

"We were briefed about the calories," said Jason. "So we made two of everything. Nicola gave us these packets?"

Tony Stark's creation, a powder that dissolved into boiling water and maximized calories. Steve already had experience eating enough non-enhanced food to get through the days but Jamie still occasionally had stomach problems from the constant starvation.

"Anyway, we have those stocked. And here's my husband."

Tyler Heung slid a baby boy into the highchair and sat down. He reached his hand across the table and shook Steve's. "Hi, I'm Tyler. I work in the legal department."

"Steve, but – well, you already know that."

Jamie loaded her plate with two of the small potpies and stuffed a forkful into her mouth.

"Um, so, yeah, some of the food is ready, obviously," Jason said.

His husband added, "I think the carrots might be done."

 _And let the awkward silence descend._

"The basement actually predates the rest of the house. This place used to be a bootlegger's distillery during Prohibition. The tunnel leads out to the woods, it's next to the water heater in the basement. It's what she'll" – Jason pointed his fork at Jamie – "use whenever she needs to leave."

"When'd they build the new house?" asked Steve.

"When an up-and-coming field agent in the nineties decided to try her hand at making a safehouse," said Tyler, returning to the dining room with steaming carrots. "I helped Nicola buy the property off the books. She asked us to buy it from her when we moved up here, gave us a good discount. We've been playing babysitters to anyone she needs to stash ever since."

Steve took the carrots and heaped a pile onto Jamie's now-empty plate. "How long do they usually stay?"

"No more'n a couple weeks at the max," Jason replied. "You're our first long-term residents."

"And the first to pay rent," muttered his husband.

"In any case, we're happy to have you. The house is also a Faraday cage – I can show you how to hook your phones up to the wifi to get reception."

Jamie chewed her food, swallowed and replied, "Already know how to do that. Guests have a separate network, then?"

She carried most of the conversation for the rest of the evening. Steve learned what a Faraday cage was, how thermal vision blocking worked, why the basement had its own wifi router and that every room was actually soundproof. "And the staircase doors are locked with a fingerprint scanner," said Tyler. "We'll know whenever you come up here and you'll know when we go down to the basement."

"Like if we ever steal your maple syrup."

Steve laughed. "That gonna happen often?"

"We're always out. It's a curse," sighed Jason.

Tyler shoved his husband playfully and kissed him, short and lovingly. Steve's stomach knotted but he grinned just the same.

Jamie cut herself a slice of pie.

* * *

The clock said 0548 and Jamie was already out of bed. She kept an interesting sleep schedule but it was mostly all the naps she took – a double-whammy of sixty years of sleep deprivation and a baby one week past their due date. Steve's moment of panic passed once he found her in the kitchen, reading an e-book and tapping at her phone randomly.

Jamie had taken to modern technology better than Steve did. Then again, she'd watched color TV news reports of his death in 1945, used GPS to hunt down a Soviet defector in the 60s and communicated with her handlers on long missions over cell phones in the 80s. Adapt or die.

If it was up to Steve he'd stick a TV in the living room and a notepad on the refrigerator and say "that sounds interesting" whenever Tony Stark went on about a new invention; Jamie took Stark's ideas and ran with them and though the experimental heliscreen on the fridge was nice, it all still went over Steve's head sometimes.

"I'm thinking French toast? For breakfast?"

Jamie shrugged, eyes still on the book.

"Have you eaten yet?"

"Not hungry."

"Why?"

She tapped on her phone again, once more twenty seconds later, and replied, "I ate a lot last night."

Steve looked down at the phone, at the stopwatch app showing early laps of fifteen minutes, descending into the five-minute range. "Are you in labor?"

"I think so." Jamie frowned. "Hard to tell."

"How long?"

"Woke up around four?"

Steve used the fridge screen to search when to go to a doctor for contractions. "Okay. I'm calling Jemma."

Jamie went back to her book.

She didn't make a sound when she pushed their daughter out. Her eyes grew vacant and she balled her fists so tight Steve was afraid she'd break her fingers, or the prosthetic's metal plates, but she never opened her mouth.

Simmons threw up twice, she was so concerned, and it didn't help that her medical training expected the mother to be screaming bloody murder, not gritting her teeth and breathing steady. She kept repeating that she was just an Academy student, she had two PhDs but that didn't mean she was a medical doctor, why was this her job – but she still pulled the baby out and only left for her hotel room when the SHIELD doctor arrived.

They named her Caitriona, after Steve's grandmother, and Tereza, because she was the first Barnes baby in two generations who came naturally and without complications. Steve filled out the birth certificate with the parents listed as Tyler and Jason Heung and her name Katherine Theresa.

"I think you have a boner for trees, we need to stage an intervention," said Tony, once he arrived at the house in his shiny self-driving car. "All right, where's the kid?"

Steve moved out of the doorway and gestured to Jamie, nursing Cait on the couch while the TV played reruns of crime dramas.

"And there she is."

"In the flesh," commented Jamie. She brushed Cait's baby hair from her eyes and tickled her cheek to get her to latch back on and nurse; she would break off if she lost her mom's eyes.

"Aw man, no one's gonna believe me when I tell 'em I've seen the Winter Soldier's boobs."

"You're disgusting, Tony."

"Better or worse'n my dad?"

Steve thought about it. "If you were his type you couldn't walk past him without getting looked over, but he was never crude or explicit. He got bored with someone fast. Jarvis spent maybe half his time getting Howard's flames off the warpath, and the other half covering up all of Howard's illegal activities."

Tony frowned. "So all those lectures about breaking the law..."

"Homosexuality was illegal in Britain then," Jamie murmured. "Colonel – colonel – he didn't care what Stark did in his free time, no one did but the civilian cops hated gay Americans. The army had to ban all off-base relationships to be equal about it."

"Your dad was a civilian, technically. They couldn't order him to stop."

"He spent – he spent – he..."

She faded off, stuck in another memory rut – her therapist's words. Steve waited for her to shake herself out of it, but when her eyes stayed glassy after more than a few seconds he kissed her cheek and said, "He spent more nights in a London jail cell than I can remember. Eventually the cops and the gay clubs made a deal – they'd stop raiding 'em if they banned Howard Stark from every premises."

Tony laughed, rolled his eyes. "And he lectured me about breaking laws."

"What laws did _you_ break?" asked Jamie.

"Uh... I might've been addicted to cocaine for part of college."

Steve felt the need to point out, "You started college at fifteen."

"Yeah. And?"

Jamie rolled her own eyes. "Steve. Don't be a twit."

"Don't be a twit," said Mark Flanagan, and his buddies laughed at Steve's bleeding face, torn pants, shoes lined with –

Steve walked away.

They had laundry to fold, jeans and flannel and the last of Jamie's stretchy maternity pants. Steve put it away slowly, trying to control his breathing like the therapist had advised him. How couldn't Jamie have remembered why –

How couldn't she have remembered. Wow, Steve thought – he must really be a twit if he was thinking that.

"Steve," said Jamie quietly, knowing he could hear her from the living room. "We should have dinner soon."

 _Okay_. "Okay."

Steve returned to make dessert – lemon merengue pie, one of the many foods he'd discovered he loved now that he had the money to buy things he didn't know he'd want to eat – as Tony continued a rant about Stark Industry's current chairman of the board of directors, who seemed convinced he was still CEO. "God forbid he ever loses the board," commented Steve, launching their friend into a new topic: all the "weather underground wanabes" on said board who wanted to shift the company's focus to renewable energy.

"Y'know what, Obie's right about this – we're iron mongers. We don't do _energy_."

"Hydra uses Stark weapons."

Tony froze. "What."

"The anti-aircraft weapons 'specially," continued Jamie. "That spy plane that got shot down over the USSR, that was them. They wanted to end the – what was it?"

Steve answered, "Détente. And you used their guns, right?"

She nodded. "I like Kalashnikovs better."

"Hold on, I think I had something in my ear. There's no way you like Kalashnikovs more than Stark guns."

"SRs are too flashy, too much shit in 'em. Too much weight."

"You can free-lift five hundred pounds."

"Seven-fifty," Steve cut in, "and weight matters a lot for snipers."

Tony huffed. "Well I haven't heard complaints from the GIs."

"You think soldiers get to choose their weapons? It's the contractors and lobbyists." He spooned filling into the pie crust. "Y'know what doesn't screw people over?"

Jamie: "Clean energy."

"What about the poor coal miners?"

Steve slid the pie into the toaster oven. "Build the factories in Kentucky."

"You know how expensive healthcare coverage would be?"

"You only complain about cost when you're looking for excuses not to do something," Jamie told Tony.

Tony huffed and Steve changed the topic: "We'd, um..."

He sat down, rubbed his daughter's head, ran his fingers through her hair. "We can't baptize her now, obviously. But when we do..."

Cait broke off from nursing, seemingly satisfied for now – it would last two seconds, Steve knew, and she'd be back to whining – and squirmed against her mother's grip.

"Wait, you're – you're asking me? Me?"

"No, I'm asking the fourth person in the room."

Tony pointed at Cait. "I think the church doesn't let people be their own godfathers."

"The fourth _adult_ ," Steve sighed.

"Oh, so the other genius playboy –"

"You've used that line before," commented Jamie. She lifted their daughter up and burped her against her shoulder. "Just think about it."

"I haven't been to church since my parents' funerals. I'm not..."

Tony faded off, the subject of December 1991 still hanging heavy over all of them.

"I dunno if they'd even take..."

"They will," said Jamie. Steve caught himself at her certainty, and before he could say anything she repeated, to him, "They will."

 _Ding_ went the oven. Steve pulled out the pork chops and they moved to the dining room – except for Cait, who went to bed.

"So when're you getting out of this rattrap?"

"Two weeks." Jamie looked up, at the window that showed the front yard.

"Where're they sending you?"

She shrugged. She liked to pretend she didn't care that she'd be out in the world again, seeing the sun and feeling the wind on her face.

Steve knew she hated being inside. She'd always been comfortable in the tall buildings and factories of Brooklyn, but after he pulled her out of Kreischberg she was never comfortable staying in one place for very long, especially if that place was base camp.

He thought her restlessness would go away once the war ended, once they settled down and had kids. Now, it seemed Cait only added to her anxiety.

"Well. Have fun."

"Don't let Fury know you told me that."

Tony laughed, the tension brought on by the thoughts of a mission faded, and they passed the rest of the night – the whole two-day-long visit, really – at ease.

Four days before Fury was set to arrive and supervise Jamie on her first mission, Steve forced himself to voice the thoughts he'd had tumbling around his head since Tony visited.

"I could talk to Fury about arranging something for Sunday mornings. No one pays attention to the people in the back – or maybe after missions, even overseas, by the time anyone recognized you you'd be long gone and they do services in vernacular nowadays so you'd understand them and the words come right back..."

He faded away as she shook her head. "Fury wouldn't let me."

"You don't know until you try."

Jamie closed her eyes, shook her head again, took a shaky breath. "Let it go, love. Let it go."

Steve knew better than to push her. He let it go, reluctantly, and returned to prepping for his own mission.

The day of the mission Fury said two words – "suit up" – before disappearing into the moonshine tunnel. Jamie bolted straight for her room and reappeared in her uniform not a minute later.

She'd sewed that thing for months, hidden pockets and chest straps and elastic bands built into the pants lining that needed a stitch that she'd never quite got down and still needed Steve to do for her.

Her eyes lit up as they hadn't in months wearing it.

Steve smiled, kissed his wife goodbye and told her to be safe. "When'll you be back?"

"Twelve hours," she replied, tapping her leg. Steve didn't miss her glances towards the boiler room.

"All right. Knock 'em dead." Jamie winced. "Er, not really. You know what I mean. Good luck."

She left. Steve wandered around the apartment, empty of his wife for the first time he'd ever been there. He wondered if it felt as quiet when he left for work every day.

He didn't like it.


	4. Chapter 4

_I had my first big report for my thesis project due Thursday, which is my poor excuse for not getting this chapter out on time._

 _Warnings for: depictions of rape, self-performed abortion; mentions of violence._

* * *

She woke up when Steve left the bed. The clock said 0344; muffled sounds from the kitchen said that Steve was listening to something.

Wouldn't he know by now a better way to hide things from her?

Jamie recognized the sounds by the time she passed the bathroom, and her blood ran cold.

They'd always strapped her down for breeding, and the scene she found playing on Steve's laptop showed just that. She remembered it perfectly but she didn't remember it at all. They all blended together thanks to the memory wipes and her own dissociation; she didn't survive that many men taking their turn with her over and over again without detaching herself from the world.

It was easy but she still hated it: the only order was to stay still, and she had no way to prove herself to her handlers or comply extra-well to lessen the constant conditioning. The worst, by far, was when they would find her clit and rub as if they cared what she felt. The first few times it happened she didn't know better and made noise; it only goaded them, though, and if she reacted they would twist and pull and pinch until she wanted to cry.

Pain that disguised itself as pleasure was always worse than simple punishment, so she learned better to avoid it.

Steve, nowadays, learned to avoid her clit directly and instead move around it.

It was a concrete floor, this time, and the grain of the footage hinted to its age. Jamie recognized the man on top of past-her: a lackey of Zola's, no name that she could recall but his self-doubting character had always stood out to her.

The lackey groaned, panted and stilled his rocking; he withdrew and Jamie watched a line of white dribble across the floor. And there the asset was: arms shackled to the floor, a thick band around its neck and another spreading its feet wide. It was clothed – nakedness made the men think they were having sex, not performing their duty to Hydra, and outside of dedicated breeding time the asset was off-limits for anything sexual – and the point of entry was a slit in the v of the pants.

Off went the lackey, and in his place another man. And another, and another, until –

Zola.

He'd always smiled at her, proud and smug. Back then Jamie thought she was doing a good job, following well his orders, but now she knew it was only because he'd brought Captain America's wife so low.

Steve closed the window when Zola unzipped his fly and opened the next file from the long list shown on the screen. Fuzz played for a few moments, replaced then by the exam room in the San Antonio base: the asset lay strapped to an exam table, belly slightly round and exposed to the air. A technician performed an ultrasound, confirmed with Zola that everything was going well, and they left the room to print out the scan.

The whole time the asset stared off to the side of the room. Ten seconds after the men left it broke the bonds, collected a thin metal wire lying on the floor and shoved it up its vagina and cervix without hesitation.

Jamie closed the laptop screen; she didn't need to see what happened next and neither did Steve. It was the same every time: Zola – Lukin – Karpov – Pierce would beat her, shock her, fix her in place so she'd kneel while the remains of a child born too early to live fell into a receptacle.

That was the Catch-22 of breeding: any of the drugs they used to keep her obedient, keep her forgetting, would attack a fetus. Electric shocks at any effective level induced contractions; the chemicals used to prevent her head from exploding during a wipe stayed in her system for weeks and prevented conception. Beatings ruptured the placenta. There was nothing they could do but chain her to the wall, or in Pierce's case a bed, and hope her memories were too far suppressed to push her into another self-abortion.

Most of the time the malnutrition got to the baby before Jamie herself did.

Steve jumped. "Oh. Hi."

"Don't do that to yourself," she told him.

He leaned into her chest and she wrapped her arms around his head. Her mind screamed against contact but he needed it, so she gave it to him.

"I should've looked for you, I'm so sorry..."

She ran her fingers through his hair, rubbed his head. "It's over. It's done. It won't happen anymore."

It was true – Fury had no interest in more supersoldiers, and besides she'd need to replicate the serum to do so, which meant labs and blood samples and paper trails... all too risky.

No, the assistant director didn't care about any of that. She would use the two of them as leverage, a way to get rid of the primary threat to her climb up the SHIELD ladder – Hydra – and secure her position at the top of the agency.

"Come back to bed."

"Jamie, I can't..."

"I know." She ran her thumb over his cheek. "Just come back to bed."

Thank God he did what she asked.

The baby woke up crying not a minute after and Steve left to calm it down. The next Jamie knew the clock said 0558 and she lay frozen next to a blond man with a half-hard cock and –

" 'S too early," he mumbled when she shook him awake. "Go back asleep."

"Steve," she said, and he cracked an eye open.

"Oh. Okay."

Steve pulled her out of bed and shoved her up against the wall. She braced herself against the bricks but he knocked her hands away and she fell onto her breasts, wincing at the sharp pain. Steve pulled down her pajama pants, felt her wet – if she let him get her ready it would ruin this for her – the next thing she knew he pulled her hips back and shoved himself into her cunt.

He fucked her slow, one hand holding her two own above her head while the other splayed across her belly. The first time they did this she'd had to walk him through it, which almost ruined the whole thing, but he caught on quickly and salvaged it.

Her forehead would be rubbed raw when he was done, her nose red from being pressed into mortar. She grunted against the discomfort, and how his dick felt too big for her and maybe she hadn't done the best job getting ready because he kept hitting her cervix. Still, it was only a pinch to be honest.

Steve sped up after a quarter-hour and only lasted another couple minutes. She felt the hot stream of come fill her – she never told her husband every time it made her blood run cold – but it trickled down her leg instead of resting in her cunt.

"I don't understand why you like this," Steve murmured in her ear.

Jamie wrenched her hands away from his and pushed herself away from the wall; Steve backed up with her, his dick soft but still inside her cunt, exposing her back to the air.

"It's supposed to hurt," she explained. He tensed so she clarified: "I expect it to hurt. But it doesn't."

"Is that why we do this after you have nightmares?"

"Or when you watch old videos of Zola raping me."

Steve eased himself out and away from her. "I'm sorry."

"You knew it happened. You don't have to watch it too."

"Jason was swamped with files. I took some to help."

"And the best time to watch them was at three in the morning."

He touched her waist, light as a feather, but she brushed him off.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just don't do it again."

"Okay." Steve leaned his head against the nape of her neck. "Okay."

He touched her waist, light as a feather, and she let him.

It was hard, knowing Zola had taped it all. Lukin didn't bother – he classified them as experiments, keeping only written records – Karpov only conducted it twice, and earned her willing loyalty when he decided to never do it again, and Pierce...

Pierce only tried breeding once. Jamie didn't need tapes to relive that.

"Turn around," Steve said, and she complied. He backed her up against the wall again but this time kissed her mouth, neck, breasts through the thin nightshirt, belly, legs, and by the time he pressed his tongue into her cunt she was shaking from the pressure buildup. He drove her to two orgasms before carrying her back to bed to continue.

He needed this. She needed to know he wouldn't hurt her, and he needed to know he could still make her feel good – that Zola and Lukin and Karpov and Pierce hadn't ruined him for her – that she wanted him to fuck her just as badly as he did, and he wasn't forcing her into anything.

They made it another few rounds before the baby cried itself awake and Steve brought it back to their room for breakfast.

Jamie had decided pretty quickly that she'd rather have interrupted sleep and nurse through the day than wake up every few hours in the night. Steve took the night shifts up until week six; after that Cait was left alone to figure it out at night, and in a different room.

Week three of the new approach was going better than the first couple had, she had to admit. Jamie wouldn't bond at all with the baby until it weaned – she hated breastfeeding for every reason – but even this little layer of separation eased her mind.

She hadn't thought Cait would stay. She thought it'd miscarry like all the other times but it never happened, and sometime during those months her brain fell back into a breeding mindset, detached from everything happening in her own body. She pushed the baby out and Simmons handed it right back, though, and everyone acted like this was her responsibility. Steve asked for a name and Jamie thought, _that's not how this is supposed to happen_.

Without the serum injections to ensure offspring enhancement, SHIELD should have had no interest in the baby – it would be dropped off at an orphanage, or whatever they did these days. Jamie was an investment and anything she did had to produce results, benefit the agency. She forgot two things: she wasn't used in the field enough for a crying bundle of fragility and poop to hinder productivity, and Steve was a normal person who would obviously want to raise his daughter.

Never mind that Jamie spent so much more time taking care of Cait than he did. Never mind if he ever got overwhelmed he could leave – take a walk, go to the store, do work at the office. Never mind the only glances of the outside Jamie got were of the yard surrounding her cage and the deserted forests around Fury-selected Hydra bases.

The baby broke off, finally, and Jamie handed it back to Steve. He never questioned why she had him do all the washing, diaper changes and midnight singing-back-to-sleep.

Jamie made breakfast, kissed her husband goodbye and brought the baby up the Heungs for the day. Once alone she read an e-book, did her physical exercises, finished _Friends_ , masturbated, made cookies, did handwriting exercises, threw knives at a pumpkin, picked up Cait and made dinner just in time for Steve to come home and kiss her hello.

Rinse and repeat.

* * *

The lights of Timanezh used to shine bright at night, powered by its own power plant – nuclear, of course – and without care to the whispers of the town below it.

Jamie never learned what the name of the town was. It was gone, abandoned, the residents scattered by the collapse of the iron curtain. Anyone who knew anything she'd put a bullet into the day the KGB sold her to the Americans.

Timanezh: a fortress. No gaps, no weaknesses.

She scaled a crumbling wall under the east lookout outcrop. The guards assumed any threats would come from the northwest, forested approach – and besides who wanted to stand watch with wind blasting into your face?

The east lookout post was where Jamie was assigned most often. She knew it like the back of her hand.

Inside the base held a stillness, the ghosts of dead experiments and soldiers chilling the air. Jamie wound her way through halls for hours, sketching the layout in her mind for debrief until she had it memorized. She slipped out as easily as she came in, ahead of schedule as usual, and spent her extra time wandering towards Lithuania.

The forests of Eastern Europe were some of Jamie's favorites. She always felt distant in them, protected, buffered from anyone else. At home she was raw but the woods weren't interested in her feelings or how far she could make a shot or how quiet she walked. Trees didn't punish her if she stepped on twigs, clomped on leaves, scared birds.

Her phone beeped: she was late for her check-in.

Things like check-ins and phones and handlers made her raw.

She met her backup across the border in Lithuania, where SHIELD had an authorized presence.

"The disks?"

Jamie exchanged the floppy disks with Fury for a sketchpad. She drew steadily even through turbulence, ignoring the awkward stares of three new tac team members also on the plane. They dropped her off in the middle of a fallow field and she walked the five miles to the hollowed-out tree that held the entrance to her home's bootleg tunnel.

She had thought, when she switched sides, that she was free of Hydra. She never had to see them again or revisit their bases. The Winter Soldier was an asset used against its owner's enemies, leaving statements with every explosion and body – actions meant to be noticed.

There were better ways that Fury could use her than for sneaking around hidden bases, planting surveillance that didn't lead her to a target for elimination – taking notes of guard rotations for future SHIELD teams to use when they stormed in – copying encrypted data and working through old storage rooms to map out their financial systems –

And all of it, once Jamie finished each mission, was off-limits to her. She couldn't even work off the intel she gathered. No, all she did was sneak back into the apartment, kiss Steve good morning or afternoon or night and settle back into good ol' domestic imprisonment.

She had dinner with Jason, Tyler and their son Philip, who was a year and a half old and took to Cait well. For all he knew the baby was his sister: they were in the same home-run daycare, his dads took care of both of them and it was there when he woke up and when he fell asleep. It meant nothing that his aunt and uncle who lived in the basement were around a lot to babysit them both.

Steve was off with Jamie's sister's family for Easter. He'd promised to be back no later than Monday evening but she knew him; he'd find excuses to stay longer, free himself of his wife and their oppressive apartment.

The Heungs didn't judge her if she handed the baby over and let Tyler feed it a bottle. Steve? He sighed and made to look like he was fine with it, and Jason sighed and cast annoyed looks at Steve.

"So how was Timanezh?" asked Tyler.

"Empty." Jamie shoved a giant forkful of pot pie into her mouth; she'd made three: one for dinner today, two more for dinner whenever Steve got back. "Cold."

"Got a lot of intel, though. Hey, didja know that the country's nuclear launch codes are kept on eight-inch floppy disks?"

"They're harder to steal."

"Really?"

Jamie shrugged. "If you take 'em, they'll just change the codes before you can crack the encryptions. Can't fake 'em, they check. The only way is to copy 'em, and that means carrying around a computer that can read and duplicate eight-inch floppy disks."

"How big would a machine like that have to be?" asked Jason, refilling his son's bowl of peas.

"We needed a team of – what, four people?"

Tyler choked on his water. " _You stole American nuclear codes?_ "

"Well, no. One of 'em dropped her corner of the computer on her foot, yelled out in pain and that's why the US still uses eight-inch floppy disks for their nuclear launch codes."

"What happened to them?"

"Well they couldn't have the chance to talk, so..."

The adults cleared their throats, the babies whined at the sudden lack of attention and the topic dropped.

Steve, naturally, didn't ask her about the mission. Why would he, when he was always busy with his own?


	5. Chapter 5

"I heard a rumor yesterday," said Fury, "about a criminal APB."

Jamie shifted her left arm slightly and stuffed what was left of her burger into her mouth with her right hand. Cait, still nursing, broke off to stare at her mother. Jamie stared back for the length it took to chew and swallow her food, and told her, "It's right there. You don't get to be picky."

Steve began, "Jamie..."

"Seems the new KGB lost their best weapon," Fury continued, clearing out her throat with a sip of water. "Escaped, a year and a half ago. My source didn't know how long they'd been looking, but they provided a physical description."

Cait whimpered.

"Jamie," repeated Steve.

"One night without a full belly won't kill her," his wife muttered, reaching for the corn.

"I am not going to bed with a hungry baby."

"She's tired. She'll fall asleep."

"Yeah, and wake up crying in an hour!"

Jamie tightened her jaw.

 _Ladies and gentlemen, we've found tonight's hill to die on._

"I'll make the formula," he told her, and left the table.

Steve came back with a warm bottle to find his daughter nursing happily, held at the angle she preferred, and his wife's eyes vacant.

"I explained things to her," said Fury, clearing her place at the table. "As I was saying," she continued, addressing Jamie, "Hydra knows you're gone. It won't be long before the media picks up on it. You'll be in the papers soon enough.

"Keep her quiet," she added, gesturing to Cait. "Once they figure out who you are, your husband'll be under a microscope. We'll be cutting back on your mission times."

"Is that really –" Steve cut in. "You don't have to do that."

Jamie valued all the time she had outside, so much so that Fury had reprimanded her for going AWOL after her missions and walking around undisguised in public. She always came back happier, though, sometimes even talkative, and didn't fade back into her withdrawn, tight-wound shell for up to a week after.

"She's stuck inside enough as it is. And Hydra hasn't caught sight of her yet – at least wait until then. Or when they ID her."

Fury assessed him for a long second – Cait breathed happily as she nursed, cutting through her mother's silence – and replied, "Who here has thirty years of field experience."

"It's the _only_ time she has outside."

"And she won't have any more if she gets caught."

"It's a – it's her freedom, if she thinks it's worth the risk –"

"She's not thinking objectively. She can't do a rational risk analysis –"

"Because you don't fucking let her go outside!" Steve shouted.

Fury got that look, the one that said that she'd found a soft spot and she wouldn't press on it now but if she ever had to in the future she wouldn't –

Cait wailed.

Jamie walked between her husband and her handler, grabbing their dishes, and left for the kitchen. On the table Cait kicked, cried, forcing Steve to rush to pick her up before she fell to the floor.

"Eighteen hundred, tomorrow," Fury said, and took her coat off the rack. "Captain, you already have your briefing."

Sure enough, an electronic copy sat in his email inbox and the physical folder on their kitchen counter. He hadn't even noticed Fury put it there.

* * *

Steve had a good mission, with Barton and one of the Strike teams not completely infected with Hydra. They ran into a Black Widow again but scuttled her own mission and saved the target, who they black-bagged and spirited away to a safehouse for her own well-being. It was too bad she was smart enough to build an actual black hole, otherwise she wouldn't've been on the wish list for every intelligence and terrorist group out there.

The Widow slipped away to Clint's annoyance – "She's doing it to me on purpose, I swear." – but this time they followed her GPS location a whole five blocks before she got rid of her tagged hat. So, progress.

Steve walked into their apartment and found Jamie washing her vest in the kitchen. "When'd you get back?"

She gestured to Cait sitting in her playpen, red smears on her unzipped snow jacket.

"Jason could've kept her until you got cleaned up."

"Phil has a fever."

"Is it contagious?"

Jamie held the vest up to inspect.

 _That would be a no._

"How'd your mission go?"

Not well, if she was scrubbing blood out of her clothes.

"Do we have any of the chicken left? I'm starving."

"The stroganoff's warm."

Steve opened the fridge, found the chicken and replaced it for the stroganoff in the microwave. "I'm not gonna eat it if you wanted to," he told her.

Jamie clenched the cloth in her hands hard, paralyzed where she stood. The sink water was pink.

Steve left the chicken to reheat, scooped his daughter up and said, "It's late. I'll put her to bed."

Cait fell asleep in Steve's arms as he walked her to the bathroom, so he opted to skip a bath and just changed her into her pajamas. She hadn't yet weaned from bedtime nursing but Steve wouldn't force that on Jamie, and Cait wasn't fussing at all so she'd probably eaten with Phil.

"I didn't even have to sing to her," Steve said when he returned to the kitchen. "Her head hit the pillow and she was gone." He steered around his wife to collect his plate and settled in the dining room, as far away from her as possible.

He never touched her, pushed her boundaries when she was in one of her bad moods. He knew better than to make it worse when she was already slipping towards a shutdown.

Steve finished his food, loaded the dishwasher – Jamie sat still as stone over her half-eaten stroganoff – and went to bed. Well, to his bedroom, to catch up on paperwork and review mission reports from his Strike team.

The clock said 23:38 when Jamie entered the room. Steve kept his eyes trained on his forms as he listened to her change.

"How was your day?" she asked.

Steve returned the papers to their folder. "It was good. Clint tagged the Black Widow's hat."

"How long did it take?"

"For her to ditch it? Ten minutes. But we got our woman."

"Mhmm."

He turned, finally, and asked her, "How was yours?"

"Well," said Jamie slowly, trailing her fingers along the bedcovers, "I cracked a few skulls, loaded a few hard drives and left a few surprises for the cleanup teams – yeah, a good mission."

"Did you kill anyone?"

A frown flickered across her face, as good as a yes. That she encountered anyone at all meant something had gone wrong – or Fury had her on more active assignments ever since the news dropped that the Winter Soldier had gone AWOL, and no one told Steve about it.

"I'm sorry, Jamie."

She shrugged. "It happens."

"Still. I'm sorry."

"Yeah."

Time to change the topic: "Thanksgiving is next month."

"Hmm?"

"I'm going down to New York, for, uh..."

He spent the holidays with Jamie's family, the only relatives he had left. To his sisters-in-law's kids he was the weird uncle they spent too much time hearing about as kids, who turned out to be very good with _their_ kids and open to hearing all the old stories that everyone else had tired of.

Steve came back and told the stories to Jaime, and if he was lucky she cracked a smile.

"Let me know how they're all doing."

"Sure. But I'm coming back on Saturday. We can do something special over the weekend."

"Like what?"

Good of her to ask. "I can show you..."

Steve backed his wife against a wall, slid his hand up her pajamas and around her underwear and rubbed until her kisses turned harsh. She lifted her back off the wall and he pulled the elastic bands down. They didn't need condoms anymore – she had an IUD and he'd gotten a vasectomy – so Steve unzipped his fly, gave himself a couple good pumps before he pushed his dick inside of her.

Oh, God, that friction...

"Someone's been waiting up for this," she murmured.

Steve didn't usually talk during sex – Jamie had never liked to, anyway, and she was his only experience – but the first few times in this century he'd taken care to ask her how she was feeling and if she was okay or wanted to stop.

Jamie took that and ran with it, usually chatting happily right up until she orgasmed.

"You were out, then I was out – yeah," Steve told her, "it's been too long. You feel so good."

"Wet and tight, just for you."

It used to be she hated the tiniest hint of friction, spent too long dating boys who didn't realize foreplay was necessary instead of a favor to their partner. Truth be told Steve was just happy she still enjoyed having sex even when she'd been so desensitized it was a challenge to work her up to an orgasm. It took time, hours sometimes, but they had the stamina and the will for it.

"Good." Steve kissed her, keeping his thrusts frustratingly steady and long. "Wouldn't want it any other way."

They fell into an odd silence, panting and gasping as Steve shoved Jamie slowly higher up the brick wall. She pushed her hips down against his thrusts so he ran his finger around her waist – there she was, shivering, she was too wound up to get anywhere near a climax if she didn't –

"I don't mind."

"Mhmm?"

Jamie continued, "That SHIELD owns me," and grabbed his hair to bring him in to kiss again.

Steve pulled back. "What?"

"I don't mind that they own me. You can let Fury know, right? I think she's worried I'm not happy."

By definition, people with depression weren't happy.

"Jamie –"

No, that was the wrong way to say it. He always defaulted to that tone, "I don't want to hurt you but your conditioning made you think something was so when it isn't actually so", and she always reacted badly.

Steve pulled out and rested his forehead on the wall. "Why do you think SHIELD owns you?"

Jamie shot back, "Why do you think they don't."

Yup. She was upset.

"No one's – they're not hurting you, are they? On missions? Yeah. And if you don't want to do a mission you don't have to." Steve scrambled for other examples, objective ways to prove that Jamie had her freedom. "We can leave –"

"No, _you_ can leave. I'm stuck in here. Stuck with food and housework and the _baby_ " – she thrust her hand towards Cait's room – "and the only time – the _only time_ I can get out is – are the missions! And Fury knows that, tosses 'em at me like scraps and – and –"

 _I wasn't let out at all. I know it was wrong but I had to go outside. I just wanted to see the sun._

"And how do you think Hydra broke me? After I didn't know why I was fighting, that's what they did!"

"I'm not – we're not Hydra," he stuttered, and she rolled her eyes.

"Not this again. I _know_ that. You think I would've carried Cait to term if I didn't?"

Steve suppressed a shiver, because this was their daughter, his baby girl, a little brown-haired ray of sunshine, and how could Jamie even think about –

No, of course she could. His stiff, ever-alert wife who called herself broken even when she'd gathered the pieces and only ever tripped over the ragged edges that held them together. She spent sixty years protecting herself against the people who owned her, and why would she act any different if she thought SHIELD did too?

"SHIELD owns me. Fury, she thinks I'm not happy with it. Tell her I'm fine, okay? Make sure she knows. And when this is finished..."

Jamie held his hands, pressed her thumbs into his palms. "When this is finished, when Hydra's gone, you promise me – take Cait and go. Get out of here before she finds some way to keep you, too."

"I'm not going to leave you!" Steve wrenched his hands away. "When this is over, when we take them down – we can go wherever we want. No more SHIELD, no –"

" 'We'?"

He knew what she meant: " _You_ , but – but I hope you let me come, too. And Cait. But if you want to go places yourself – I'll take care of her for as long as you need, to figure yourself out. I'll be here."

 _And if you don't come back..._

"And if I don't come back?"

 _My heart would break. Again._

"Then..."

He told the truth, the part that wouldn't make him feel shitty for saying it: "I can't stop you."

She gauged him coolly for a dead, never-ending moment, then shook her head. "Fury won't let me go. I'm her ticket up the SHIELD ladder."

"Not everything is – you're not a _tool_."

"That's exactly what I am. There's sixty years of –"

"It's not who you are _now_."

"I'm not anything. Legally I'm dead. There's nothing written down that says how Fury can treat me – she could order me out of here, never come back, and I..."

For all that Steve didn't want to know what she would do, he had to: "And you'd do it? Leave me and Cait and never look back?"

Oh, God, those were tears in her eyes. He'd never seen her cry before, not... not now.

"I won't have a choice," replied Jamie, and her voice cracked.

"She doesn't own you! You don't have to do what she says!"

She closed her eyes, shook her head, took a shaky breath. "When did you bury your head in the sand?" she asked, and...

Steve's phone rang. The caller ID said it was Barton, the scrolling alert of a text from him contained «BW» – if he wanted to talk about that damn Widow again Steve swore –

"You should take that," said Jamie, her voice thick and quiet. "I'm going to sleep."

She grabbed a blanket and stalked out of the room.

He accepted the call but it was too staticky for him to make out Clint's words; it dropped not a minute later. Instead of reading the text Steve went in search of his wife, and found her curled up on the couch. Jamie always fell asleep in moments, woke up just as quickly too. No doubt she'd relied on that to avoid him so many times in the last couple years.

She looked so peaceful asleep, her frowns and heavy eyes disappeared as her face smoothed over. If Steve ignored the scars and the perfect teeth – at some point the KGB decided to play dentist – he could pretend it was 1939 and they were newlyweds in Brooklyn, or 1944 and on-leave from the hell of the Western Front.

It was 2005. Steve pretended his wife wasn't imprisoned in this house. Jamie pretended it didn't kill her.

He adjusted the pillow to keep her straight on the couch, checked in on Cait – still asleep, thank God that Jason always fed her if no one picked her up by 8PM – and walked back to the bedroom. His phone weighed heavily in his hand, a decision he had to make before Jamie woke up and he had to pretend again that everything was fine.

Steve dialed.

"Hi," he said. "I need to talk to Director Johnson. Now."

"I'm sorry, sir, but she's unavailable. If you give me your name I can make an appointment."

"Sure. Steve Rogers."

He heard the cogs work through the secretary's brain, and then, sooner than he'd expected: "Please hold."

Director Johnson knew about Jamie. She had to – there was no way Fury could get approval for a long-term op like this without the director authorizing money transfers and personnel reassignments. Steve had only talked to his boss a handful of times, and just twice about Operation Freezer Burn – Tony's name for it, not Steve's – but he couldn't think of any other way to help Jamie right now.

Jamie didn't know about Director Johnson.

"Captain. What's this about?"

"I quit."


	6. Chapter 6

The note on the kitchen counter said "outside with Cait, be back by 6ish", and Steve found them throwing leaves at each other in the woods.

"How're my favorite women doing?" he asked, kneeling down behind Cait. She giggled and handed him more leaves, and he threw them at Jamie. His wife countered with a much better-packed ball of leaves and snow. Steve had to brush his eyes of the stuff before he could help Cait build a dirty snowball of her own.

The sun set as they wandered back through the moonshine tunnel, Cait dead-tired on her father's arm. He put her down to a late nap as Jamie collected and hung their jackets.

"I made dinner. Chicken, nothing fancy." Jamie came to a stop just short of the kitchen and eyed the bags on the counter. "You got groceries?"

"Yeah. We were out of" – Steve opened the refrigerator to put the milk in – "nothing. Anymore. You went shopping too?"

Per the new agreement with Fury, Jamie had one of SHIELD's face masks, a three-mile radius off-base and a set of fake IDs. It was risky but in return both she and Steve signed back up on missions when the deal was set.

And the circle of knowledge expanded, with two more agents brought in to manage security on top of their regular jobs.

"Yeah. You said, we were out of everything."

"Okay. So we have double."

Back before – "everything", Steve supposed, was the only non-cliché word – Jamie would hum as she did housework. Of course she didn't anymore but he could still see it in her eyes, her hands, her movements as she rearranged the cabinets to fit extra food. She was humming.

This was a good day. She'd had been having more of them lately, with the new meds and the new deal with SHIELD. She didn't ask how Steve pulled it off – Director Johnson was still an unknown to her – but there was life in the house and it hadn't been there ever before.

This was a good day, and Steve had a chance of pulling this off.

"So, I dunno if you remember," he began, "but I hate tomatoes. Always have. Something about how they change color as they ripen – and they bruise in the heat and y'know we never had air conditioning so they always got soft and mushy so fast, and then they'd smell and attract flies but you always bought 'em, still do. You love 'em."

He put the wheel down on the counter in front of Jamie; she didn't react.

"Can you please tell me why you don't like cheese?"

New meds, new shrink, new peace, a new computer so that Jamie could analyze on her own the information she stole from Hydra, and a brand-spanking new apology from Fury for being a shitty handler. Steve still had no idea whether Fury had manipulated Jamie on purpose or just didn't realize she'd equated SHIELD with Hydra, but Jamie didn't seem to hold it against her either way.

It was a good day, so his wife's expression didn't immediately close off. "I don't know."

"Whatever it is, it's okay if you –"

"I said, I don't know."

Steve nodded, returned the cheese to the fridge and asked, "Is it a trigger?"

"No, I –"

Jamie closed her eyes, breathed deeply. "I don't know. I look at it and I don't like it. I taste it and I don't like it. I'm sorry I... I shouldn't've stopped you from buying it."

"It's okay. I don't mind, I can get my cheese fix at the office." She huffed, a small laugh. "But y'know what the shrink said about pushing yourself."

"She said not to do anything I feel off about."

"She also said to get out of your comfort zone. And we _do_ live right next to cheese country."

Jamie tapped her finger on the counter. "I'll pull up some recipes, make something next week."

"Thank you." He kissed her cheek. "How was your day?"

"It was good. I finished that book Tony recommended."

Steve fished one of the pans out of the oven: six chicken thighs, still hot and sizzling and covered in butter. Most of the calories they got came from the sauces Steve made religiously and the powder-soaked vegetables they ate so often, but it was still nice to eat regular food.

He was sick of butter, and cheese had a shit ton of calories too. But now was the time to count his blessings and not push his wife any more on the subject.

"You mean the one his assistant gave him for Christmas?"

"Yeah, I don't know what she was thinking. It's good though. I think he should read it."

"What's it about?"

"The Enigma machine, how Britain used it to crack the kr– Nazi's codes. Written by one of the guys who worked with Peggy 'fore she transferred to the SOE."

"At Bletchley?"

"Mhmm."

They finished up dinner, made out for a while on the couch and only stopped when their daughter cried. Steve almost plowed into Jamie in the hallway, stopped in front of Tony Stark's Christmas present. "I still don't understand why he had to frame it," she grumbled. "I already downloaded it for you."

"There's something about having a physical copy."

"Something dumb, yeah."

Cait wailed again – hungry, probably – and Jamie added, "I'm gonna give her a bath."

Steve stayed in the hallway to reread the article. As always, his eyes were drawn to the words "winter soldier" and "gone rogue" highlighted in green. Tony had to invent a new kind of highlighter ink to keep the newspaper print from running when he annotated it.

One of the reporters had requested an interview with Steve, trying to get his thoughts for the gigantic article. He asked her not to mention him but he still showed up everywhere: Jamie's rumored powers compared to Steve's own confirmed ones, how close he and Howard Stark had been – they hadn't, actually – and the too-accurate guess that SHIELD would eventually send their supersoldier to take down the other.

Jamie reemerged with a whiny Cait in her arms, glanced at the article and said, "They talked about you too much."

"At least they didn't mention _you_ ," he replied, and followed her into the bathroom.

Steve dodged a flying plastic boat just as Jamie dumped a bucket of water over Cait's head. She howled and kicked – "It's warm, don't be a baby about it." / "She _is_ a baby." – and by the time Steve wrapped her in a towel both her parents were soaked.

"She has your throwing arm," he commented, rubbing Cait's hair dry with a towel in one hand while the other kept her squirming to a minimum.

"I'll sign her up for little league." Jamie sighed, switched the water to the shower and shed her clothes. "You're welcome to join."

"I'm a little old for little league, don't you think?"

Jamie tossed a bucket of water on him.

"I'm going to Moscow," she told Steve, after Cait finally fell asleep and they dragged each other back to their bedroom. "Leaving in the morning."

"To the KGB?"

Jamie nodded. "They have – I'm going to be seen. A lot. The government won't be able to cover it up."

"Is that the plan?"

She kissed him. "That's the plan. And Jemma's flight gets in tomorrow afternoon."

"I thought that was next week."

Jamie shook her head. "That's Tony. They're going to the same conference but she has to get here early to prep."

"How long's she staying?"

" 'Till she goes down to Saint Paul for the conference."

In the morning Steve moved Cait's crib into their bedroom and changed the sheets on her bed. He picked Simmons up from the airport and listened to her chatter on about her newest research project with Fitz – "When are you going to ask him out?" Steve asked, and Jemma veered into stuttering about how they were just friends – the whole drive back.

"Oh, I always forget how cozy your flat is," she said as she hung her coat up. "Basements are wonderful. Where's Jamie?"

"On assignment. She'll be back tomorrow morning."

Steve retrieved Cait from the Heungs and let her toddle over to Jemma, who gasped and scooped her up. "Hello there, Caitriona. Such a pretty name. And no one will confuse you with Jenny down the hall from you, or give her your Very Important research data hard drive. I pulled you out of your mum, did you know that?"

Cait made baby noises and laid her hands on Jemma's face.

"Can you say Jemma? Jem-a?"

Steve laughed and handed Jemma a plate for dinner.

In the middle of the night Steve's phone buzzed: his news app, dropping a story out of Russia into his notifications. It told Steve that his wife had snuck into the Kremlin, shot dead a minister dead as he prayed in one of the churches and vanished into the screaming crowd of tourists – but not before someone caught her on camera. The photo was smartphone-shot and blurry but Jamie – left forearm, narrow back, brown hair and wicked-looking assault rifle – could be seen clear enough.

No, that was not something the government could cover up.

He scrolled past the analysis, the paragraph that relayed that Tony Stark couldn't be reached for comment, and zeroed in on the witness comments: "Kept to herself," said one tourist. Another mentioned she'd asked a question in German-accented English about the architectural history of the cathedral spires, and a third commented she'd gone through security before him and hadn't had a bag on her, so how did she get the long gun in?

Jamie returned in the evening with matching ushanka hats for Cait and Steve, a Soviet science history book for Simmons and a replica Fabergé egg that she put on a shelf in the dining room. The minister, she said, had been the current chairman of the KGB. Cait wore her hat inside for a week straight – Steve had a picture of her waving goodbye to Jemma with it on – until she spilled sauce on it, and Jamie hid it for outside use only.

Jemma left for the conference and Tony swung by after he finished his own presentation in St. Paul. Jamie gave him a dyed wool shawl – "we all know you'll forget to get your assistant something for her birthday" – and he ate dinner with it covering his head, claiming he was now an honorary Russian grandmother. "So did you pick this up before or after you went all Jason Bourne on Soviet Harvey Milk?" he asked.

She stiffened, Steve explained, "Yeah, so that was a cover up," and then added when Jamie wouldn't, "Before she went into the Kremlin. She had some time to kill."

"Harvey Milk, time – two more for the hit list."

"You're hilarious, Tony."

"Just one of my many talents. Pass the peas?"

* * *

"Team three in position," reported Agent Picah.

"Barton, in position."

"Berger, in position."

"Team four in position."

"Ready on my mark," Steve breathed into his comm.

Romanoff, on her first post-defection mission, commented, "They just served the appetizer. Dinner crowd's thinning. I'm going to approach –"

"Not until I give the go-ahead."

Steve could just hear his newest team member thinking her idea was the best. For all Natasha was a master at slipping into the right role for any situation, she was also a solo actor and was not good at all used to taking orders from someone during a mission.

Slipping as poison into the target's soup was something Jamie would do if she didn't want to be noticed – if she did she'd go with a headshot – and when Steve thought up the plan he thought it'd be a good one. But now...

"Romanoff, get her to invite you to dinner."

"I'll need two minutes, spearmint gum, a yellow pad and shitty pencil and... that ugly beige plaid scarf I keep seeing everywhere. Really, why do you people love it that much?"

"Dolohov."

"Or a knit scarf."

Five minutes later – Amelia Dolohov worked fast – Romanoff stumbled up to the booth where Cecília Laís Medeiros sat and asked if she could interview her about the recent crime spree that some experts were blaming on the drug gang the woman was the head of.

Medeiros was happy to correct the record for young Ms. Rivero. Romanoff tapped the bench four long times halfway through dessert, shook her dinner partner's hand and bounced happily out the door. " _O que uma bela moça,_ " said Medeiros, easily in earshot of the bug Romanoff planted. " _Talvez seu editor vai dar-lhe uma chance. Oh – desculpe-me. Onde fica o banheiro?_ "

"Team three, ready to move on my mark. Berger, time for a distraction."

"You got it."

Berger started up his corporate car and crashed it into the fire hydrant just outside the restaurant. Steve listened to the ensuing altercation with the restaurant owner, Medeiros' niece, in one ear while in the other Romanoff found an excuse to get in line for the bathroom.

Medeiros, their target, was the head of a Rio de Janeiro-turned-international gang. She visited her family's restaurant for dinner every night she was in New York City, and on those nights the Restaurante da Bahia became the most heavily-guarded building on Manhattan Island.

"Are we sure we want to take her down?" he'd asked Fury when she handed him the assignment. "She's run the cartel quieter than her sister did. Less violence, too."

"She's expanded into five other Brazilian states and is matching the Sinaloas for cocaine imports into the US. So far this year the TSA's seized four times the number of drugs linked to Brazil than they have in the last five years altogether."

"So we put people inside, make more busts. Not open up a vacuum –"

"Medeiros' second is a twenty-year CIA plant. This is a favor to them."

Okay, then.

Berger and Julia Medeiros screamed at each other on the sidewalk as Barton cut his way through the bathroom wall and Steve jumped from his perch on the fire stairs onto the target's backup security in the alley. Team three flooded the front of the restaurant; team four the kitchen; Romanoff disabled the bathroom guards.

Steve barely heard the first shot over the screams in its wake.

He finished with the cartel guards and stormed into the kitchen. Past the other cartel guards bound on the ground – the staff cowering – second shot – swinging doors – broken chair leg and pen –

Steve tripped, turned his fall into a roll and ducked behind a booth in time for the third shot. Fourth, he glanced around his cover: the figure shadowy as they walked around a cracked lamp.

Five, Steve rolled out, over his shield, and threw it at the –

"Jamie," he whispered.

She caught the shield with her left arm – metal arm – turned and threw it back. Steve doubled over as the shield hit his stomach; when he looked back up, his wife was gone.

The day passed in a blur. Medics evacuated the wounded agents and the rest of the team cleared the building. Medeiros, of course, was safe and sound right where Barton had cuffed her to the bathroom pipe, because Jamie didn't care about Brazilian drug lords.

Gallagher. Pence. Rios. Picah. Dolohov. All confirmed Hydra.

Why the hell had she gone after low-level members? – Steve was responsible for his agents and no one had told him where to assign the dirty ones. Only Jamie, knowing perfectly how her husband ran his team, could guarantee her targets would exclusively sustain injury but even then the risks...

Romanoff called for backup and extract; Barton stayed behind to coordinate with the local cops. Steve, on orders from Fury, flew back to Duluth, turned in his debrief naming his dead wife as the third party and went home. He was loudly and very publicly ordered to stay as far away from the investigation as earthly possible.

Jamie's uniform lay strewn across the hallway but everything else in the apartment was in order. Steve found both his girls asleep in the bedroom, Cait on her mother's belly. His daughter whined when he picked her up and returned her to her own room but he sang her a couple songs and she slipped back asleep easily.

Jamie was fully awake by the time he came back to her. "I didn't know," she murmured. "Fury didn't tell me and then you were there, and I couldn't back out. Not in front of her. I thought it was just gonna be the Strike team."

"What's her endgame?"

Steve never asked much about the missions Jamie went on. They targeted Hydra and their affiliates, he knew. She'd even had run-ins with Romanoff, before Clint finally got her to defect. But the most they were allowed to tell each other was when, where, for how long and what the combat level would be.

"I expose enough of Hydra to make SHIELD investigate their own. Fury can go after them above-board."

"Why couldn't I know about what happened today?"

" 'Cuz you're a shit liar. And you were on camera. Everyone needed to see you shocked."

Jamie raised her hand and laid it on Steve's cheek. "I'm sorry."

" 'S not your fault." He leaned down, kissed her deeply, stripped himself of his clothes and set a knee on each side of her. Jamie responded with her hands, her mouth, her body – Steve loved this, he always did, he could manage without the physical contact most of the time but he needed this, he really –

Jamie shuddered through her orgasm. She let Steve hold her until the morning came.

The front page of the New York Times read, "JAMIE BARNES CONFIRMED AS WINTER SOLDIER". They had a photo, too, from one of the surveillance cameras in the restaurant: shot from the left, her face turned so that it as well as her metal arm and star were crystal clear on the video. Someone from the Duluth News-Tribune, one of the daycare co-op parents, noted in her article that no one from SHIELD – she'd called Tyler and Jason Heung both – had any comments.

Rebecca Barnes-Santiago had a meltdown over the phone.

The circle expanded again: Steve invited Agent Barton to dinner once the news died down. Clint showed up with a bottle of 190-proof vodka – "for you, if you want it – I know I would" – and a six-pack of beer – "for me – and you, if you wanted that instead of..." – and trailed off when Jamie took both out of his hands.

"Okay. Guess that answers _that_ question."

Right on cue Cait ran up to hug her dad, which was about the moment when Clint's brain decided to take an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Bahamas. He returned to himself when Steve's mother's stew hit his plate and he questioned Jamie about weapons and sniper business for the rest of dinner.

"I'd call that a success," Steve commented, watching Barton's car drive off. He would've offered to drive him home but Clint claimed he had an amazing tolerance from his circus days, and besides Jamie was walking around worse than he.

"Mhmm." Jamie wrapped her arms around Steve's waist and nuzzled his neck. "You wanna celebrate my new curfew?"

"Celebrate that you can't leave the house during the day? Or that we have to keep all the curtains drawn."

"Natural light is overrated," she told him.

Steve moved his hand to stop her from unzipping his fly. "You're drunk."

"Tipsy."

"Is this because of the videos? 'Cuz we should talk about –"

"I dunna wanna talk about it," Jamie slurred. She staggered, leaned against the counter and reached for the vodka. It was a credit to Steve's reflexes – or maybe how drunk Jamie was – that he grabbed the half-empty bottle before she could get to it.

"We need to." Steve set the vodka on top of a cabinet, too high for even him to reach without a stool. "Take ten minutes, sober up and –"

"I don't. Want. To talk about it."

"So when you hand over that flash drive tomorrow to the reporter, you'll be fine? You'll look her in the eyes and –"

"And say nothing, 'cuz that's what I'm ordered to do."

"And when I get the call next week from your sister, and she's yelling because the reporter went public and one of those videos is them gang-raping you – you'll be okay?"

It was a tough decision to make, one that Fury had almost took out of Jamie's hands before Tyler stepped in and drew the line. "It's her on the tape," he said, "so she should decide."

"It'll go a long way to exonerating her," Fury shot back. "In the public's eyes, something like –"

Jamie had cut in: "Something like that will make them feel better about forgiving the things we're doing to take down Hydra. When we go public." She rolled a quarter along her knuckles. "Do it."

Of course, Steve stayed silent in the matter. He didn't want to influence his wife's decision, not on this.

Maybe he should have stepped in.

"Why don't we talk it out?"

"I don't want to."

Jamie swayed, gripping Steve's arms for support, and Steve couldn't tell whether she was comfortable with the contact because she was drunk or because her therapist was finally addressing that issue.

"On that video... one of the men off to the side, he mentions Zola."

Oh. "They have both ends of the trail now."

"Trace forward from Zola, back from the Strike agents, and they'll have the whole conspiracy mapped out."

"Most of it, at least."

Steve kissed his wife, tasting the burn in her mouth. "Won't be long now."

" 'S what I tell myself."

Jamie broke contact and stumbled off into the hallway. Steve had put Cait down hours before, much to her sleepy protests – Barton suggested they could take a puppy he'd rescued and the toddler was very much invested in the idea – so the only sounds in the apartment were his own.

Steve cleaned the kitchen – counters, stove hood, oven, dishes – living room – couch, playpen, table, TV stand – dining room – table, chairs, hutch – and was halfway through the bathroom when Jamie appeared.

"We can do that tomorrow," she told him. "Just come to bed."

Jamie lay on her bed in Brooklyn, naked and stretched out and grinning drunkenly at Steve as he touched her, hesitant. He couldn't believe they had just – he'd just – and it wasn't like he'd had some deep yearning to, honestly it would've been fine if they just stayed friends but this was what she wanted and he could never say no to her, never to her.

Jamie lay shackled to the bed, eyes dead as one of Pierce's agents took another turn on top of her. A hand reached towards her crotch and she tensed, just a shift of a pixel or two on the screen. The man pinched and pulled her skin above where he'd forced himself into and Jamie cried silent tears.

Jamie lay curled up on the bed, the sheets she'd bought with Steve's anonymous credit card, fingering the holes she ripped into it when she climaxed. All Steve wanted to do was hold her, touch her everywhere like he'd done so many times, memorize her new scars and stretch marks, but he knew better.

"Tomorrow night," Steve began, "or whenever that reporter publishes the videos, your sister's gonna call and I can't tell her you're safe, or that you miss her, or that we have a daughter. All I can tell her is 'I can't talk about it'." He shook his head. "I can't stop thinking about it. And I know that's not fair to you. But sometimes..."

Steve took a shaking breath. "All those months, when you thought I was... okay with keeping you in here. That SHIELD – and you stopped coming on to me."

Jamie knelt down next to him in front of the toilet.

"I spent so much time with Cait – I didn't have a choice in it. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was gonna snap and I didn't want to put myself in the position where I might."

"Then why did you – whenever I –"

"I can't say no to you, Steve. I can't." She paused. "I thought you knew.

"You've always been the first thing I remember, every time," she continued. "I trust you, I can't find it in myself not to. It's built into me, it's who I am. I remember that I was so unhappy during the war, miserable – I wanted to go home, I didn't want to go on missions or any of it... but you were there. You asked me to stay. So I did. I can't say no to you."

Memories floated to the front of Steve's mind: surly evenings in bars, the lonely silence that always filled their shared tent in the field, anxiety attacks he had in the hours on missions waiting for combat because Jamie didn't radio in every minute with a bad pun or random thought...

She'd never even told him about the experiment he'd dragged her out of in Kreischberg. She'd only ever joked, talked, laughed when others did too. How could he have missed how depressed she'd been?

"The things I did for Hydra – I'm still remembering them. The doctors, they say that my brain's still repairing itself and it's moving old memories around, recovering them and... and it treats them like new memories. I dream about killing people at the same time as I dream about potty-training our daughter and making dinner with Jason and having sex with you, and they blur together. I kill Cait and torture Jason and burn you alive."

Steve suppressed the urge to hug her, tell her it wasn't real.

"They aren't real. And I know they aren't. But if you... I'm not made of glass, love. You won't break me."

"I know," he mumbled.

"But when you act like that's the case, it feels like I _am_. That you're scared of what I'd do if you touched me. Like I'd snap and do those things that I dream I do."

Jamie hugged him, burying her mouth in his shoulder and letting him wrap his own arms around her. "Please come to bed."

"Okay."

Steve stood with her still wrapped around him. He carried them both to bed, to sleep not as soaked in nightmares as he'd feared it would be, and in the morning he didn't panic at the note she left saying she'd already left for Los Angeles.


	7. Chapter 7

"Ambassador," said Zola, as peevishly as a computer AI could, "You lost the asset."

 _Showtime._

Jamie closed Tetris and switched to the app on her phone that Jarvis installed once she got close enough the Zola's computers that morning. It was too easy to override Zola's controls with Tony's own AI, but then again Stark had fifteen years to perfect Jarvis and Zola only three to preserve his dying brain.

"You were the one who told us to try to breed it again," Pierce countered.

"With the proper controls! You did not follow the procedure."

"We wouldn't've needed the controls if we chose a different plan to contain Rogers. Karpov stopped that part of the program because it never worked. But _no_ , we always have to do it _your_ way."

"I rebuilt Hydra from the ashes! It is I who created Project Insight. We must stop this bickering – I have the directives to maintain the future of Insight."

"Couldn't agree more with that first one," said Jamie, and her former owner turned. "The second, not so much."

That was Jarvis's cue; it overwrote text-to-speech commands in Zola's code, rendering the dead scientist speechless. About time, too – Jamie had always wanted him to shut up.

Pierce snarled, "You also didn't tell me it used to be Captain Rogers' wife."

"He went to a lot effort to make that irrelevant. Obviously it didn't work."

Jamie's phone buzzed: a text from Steve, asking for the password to the security feeds in the bunker. She replied that Jarvis had them, stowed her phone and saw Pierce smirking when she looked back up. "Who's handling you?" she asked.

 _SHIELD, and they're doing a damn good job of it._

"Why would you think someone's handling me?"

"Because you can't operate without a handler."

"That's the triggered state. Not me."

"You're the same. It's just more compliant than you."

Steve sent another text: «10 min out. Are you done yet?»

"I don't kill people," she told Pierce. "Not willingly."

«give me 5»

"So Helena Malone forced you to kill her? She had a wife. A daughter. You knew that, and you left her in your cryo chamber for us to find."

She'd left Malone there to keep the sensors from blaring a warning when the temperature lowered.

"She's the only one I don't regret. She deserved it."

"Hmm." Pierce pressed a key on Zola's keyboard and pulled a gun. " _Zhelaniye_."

Oh, lovely. She'd finally deigned to buy the words from the Russians. "How much did you pay?"

" _Rzhavyy_ ," continued Pierce. " _Semnadtsat'_. _Rassvet_. _Pech'_. _Devyat'_."

"You shelled out forty-five million for me. Didn't they want an equal amount for the words? – They said I was useless without them."

" _Dobrokachestvennyy_. _Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu_."

"The Soviets paid an equivalent of a hundred million to Zola. They didn't find out he was dying till a month later. Thought they were cheated."

" _Odin_. _Gruzovoy vagon_."

Karpov had retired when the KGB splintered and Hydra took back their asset. He settled down in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places, and hid the trigger book along with his personal notes in the basement wall of his house. Jamie knew of it because she'd found him months ago and retrieved him for SHIELD; the book she kept for herself and showed only to her shrink.

Electroshock therapy was a bitch, even with the low buzz SHIELD's diodes had and the sedatives she insisted she didn't need but had to take. It took three slow months for them to work through all the words and phrases.

"They probably charged you extra 'cuz you were desperate."

Pierce curled her lip into a smirk, probably to hide the fear that her last resort to bring her former asset to heel had failed. "You think you know so much. You barely know anything – I wiped your brain enough to make sure of that."

"Sure," Jamie conceded. "Then you tied me to a bed for four months and didn't wipe me at all. You can blame Zola all you want but you got sloppy and that's on you."

The new supreme leader of Hydra, appointed when her boss was arrested in the third round of government purges, adjusted her aim from Jamie's head to her chest – as if she didn't know the translucent shield she'd activated was two-way.

"You aren't that good a shot," Jamie told her. "That's why you always had me do it. And that's why I hated you, always did. You never did your own dirty work."

Pierce wasn't going to confess to anything. Steve wanted her to and so did Fury – hell, everyone did. If she confessed she wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court and the inevitable trial wouldn't drag on.

Jamie didn't need a confession. Pierce had already said the words and copped to torturing her; her conversation with Zola was icing on the cake. Jamie had done her job.

"Alexandra Pierce," she said, "you're under arrest for treason, terrorism, murder, conspiracy to commit, racketeering and bribery, in addition to other charges. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. You have the right to be held for trial in the country in which you've been arrested. Do you understand these rights as I've told them to you?"

Pierce curled her lip into a smirk because yes, Jamie had told her who was handling her.

"I'll take that as a yes."

She called the elevator, hit a command on her phone and watched Pierce vanish on the other side of the safety doors. The version of Jarvis on her phone informed her that it had uploaded the recording the SHIELD's mainframe.

The bunker was dusty, empty, and the silence overwhelming as she left the building. She had to stay out of sight when Steve's Strike team arrived to take Pierce in – Fury wouldn't make Jamie's employment public for another few months but they were ready to –

Jamie walked out of the bunker and faced thirty – five, six, seven – figures: guns drawn, the letters FBI bright and bold on their vests.

Standing orders said she couldn't harm any law enforcement. She didn't resist as they slammed her against the side of a van, or when they read her the same rights she'd given Pierce and pulled a black bag over her head.

* * *

"Mama!" shouted Cait as Jamie walked up from the basement apartment to the house's first floor. She slammed into her mother's leg and buried her face in the pants fabric.

Jason approached with another toddler on his hip, concern fighting the grin on his face. "So how pissed is Steve gonna be with the FBI?"

Steve was already pissed – he'd read what Jamie wrote on the prisoner transfer forms, after all. "He said he'd file a complaint."

Cait bounced on her heels, lifted her arms up and fussed. Jamie complied, payed no heed to the silent eyes trained on her from the living room.

"It wasn't that bad," she added.

"When was the last time you ate?"

Jason got like this sometimes, worrying like Jamie was his child. At least he was openly concerned – not like Steve, who stuffed his worry down and couldn't control his body language.

"I had water on the flight up here. Stark doesn't keep food on his plane."

Her neighbor rolled his eyes and disappeared into the kitchen. Cait knocked on her mother's metal arm, calling her attention so she could say, "Gone."

"I was working," Jamie told her. "We told you I'd be gone for a while."

"Da!"

"He's also working. He'll be back soon."

She ran her hand through Cait's hair; it was a comfort now, on the other side of six days in FBI custody. There were forms to fill out and so, so many interviews to go through but right now all Jamie wanted to do was eat, shower and play with her daughter. In that order.

Jason returned with a plate of food. "When you're good to debrief," he said, "let me know. We can do it in the library."

"The dog?"

The puppy, more like. A half-grown pitbull mutt that Barton found – Steve: "Of _course_ he'd find a pet on a combat mission." – but didn't have space for in his apartment. She was happy, ran around the yard too fast for Cait to keep up and peed constantly in the kitchen.

"She's been whining for you. But we got her to use the dog door a few times." Jason pointed at the food. "Eat."

Debrief was easy, just recapping Jamie's arrest and so-called torture by the FBI. She recounted it easily – nothing to censor about being locked in a room with a bag over your head for four days straight.

She finished and Jason looked at a loss for words, letting the library fill with the sounds of the co-op daycare that the Heungs hosted. Finally he remarked that Steve was right to file a complaint and moved on.

They'd broadcast the exchange live on TV and over the internet; after all who wouldn't want to watch SHIELD and the FBI trade prisoners, or get their first glance of the infamous Sergeant Barnes?

Everyone's expectations went out the window when Steve unlocked Jamie's thick armcuffs and handed her the transfer forms. One of the FBI agents had stuttered a protest when Jamie signed the lines on Pierce's forms certifying that the woman had been Mirandized properly, but fell silent just as easy when Steve returned Jamie's gun, badge and phone to her.

Yeah – she had a badge now.

Cait insisted Jamie stay in the living room with her until daycare ended, which made for an awkward afternoon with the other parents. She firmly planted herself in front of her mother so that Jamie couldn't get up from filling out her forms while Cait herself copied her on a doodle pad. The only time either of them left the room until the daycare ended was when Cait, a month into her potty-training, declared that she needed to pee.

Come dinnertime Jamie found a remote to turn the TV off and discovered the news had discarded their coverage of "did you know Jamie Barnes was working for SHIELD this whole time" in favor of a picture of mother and daughter, once it hit naptime and Cait fell asleep in Jamie's lap.

She paused, taking in the picture. Cait looked so delicate, not the bouncy girl Jamie knew who picked herself up with no help when she fell, chattered away happily at her mother's feet in the kitchen, made nonsense drawings that Steve loved as much as Jamie found disconcerting...

"Oh," said Steve. Tyler skirted around him in the doorway and hung his own coat up. "Okay. So that happened."

After dinner Steve led the kids in a game of monkey-in-the-middle – he, of course, was in the middle – while the other adults did dishes. Tyler insisted Jamie take all the leftovers just as his phone rang for the fourth time: his parents, asking about the rumors regarding the toddler they thought was their granddaughter.

Cait fell asleep the moment Jamie put her down. Steve remarked that this was an earlier bedtime than usual, and Jamie told him they were going to have an early bedtime too.

"Did you –" Steve stuttered, "how much sleep did they let you get? You didn't put down sleep deprivation on the forms but if –"

She silenced him with a kiss. "The death metal drowned out any dreaming. But I still got sleep. I'm fine."

"Okay, then what did you – oh."

Steve was slow on the uptake, always had been, but once he got there he never hesitated to act. Jamie let him pick her up and carry her to their room.

She climaxed, finally, two hours later, sprawled across Steve's chest on the floor.

"Hon?"

"Mhmm?"

Jamie kissed his jaw, the light beard he'd stopped shaving probably when she'd left on her three-week quest to create as big a swath of destruction across Hydra's American bases as possible. "What'd you think 'bout giving Cait a little sib?"

"Now? How about we wait 'till the noise dies down."

"And that'll take – what, six months?"

"Fury told me to expect 'em to be on us for at least a year."

She did the math and frowned at the result. "How about we screw Fury?"

"Together? I don't think she'd be interested in that."

"Mama?"

Jamie groaned and pushed herself off her husband's chest.

Cait gasped from the doorway, pointed towards her parents. "Dada's wee-wee!"

"She sees us both naked in the shower all the time," Steve complained, as Jamie scooped their daughter up. "Sing her a song, how about?"

Jamie woke to a voice that tickled her memory: "...and July fourth and Thanksgiving and Christmas and you never fucking told us? Never told me! You were playing house in –"

"I wasn't playing house," said Steve. "We were both working."

"That's – you have a place. Together!"

"We're married. Stability is good."

"Stability my ass. You wanted the good 'ol post-war family life. You wanted to pretend that nothing was the –"

Steve charged out the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and Jamie was left to puzzle over the woman on the other end of the line. No accent so she couldn't be Peggy; maybe Jones, or Dernier – Dernier was dead, and besides she'd be shouting in French. Jamie couldn't remember about Jones.

The clock said it was 0640 but she felt too hungry to – no, she'd been starved for six days, she couldn't use hunger as a gauge.

Jamie didn't remember putting Cait on her belly when she went to bed.

Her phone relayed the continued chaos that purge #4 of the US government was causing. They'd expanded into the State Department and the DOD this time around, spurring some European countries to start their own witch hunts. SHIELD was suddenly everyone's favorite NATO investigative agency.

Jamie held her daughter to her chest as she got up and walked to the kitchen. She smelled pancakes.

"And can we talk about the kid!"

"A condom broke and she didn't want to take the pill!" Steve parried. He took Cait and sat her down on the counter in front of a plate. "There's nothing wrong with that."

"Oh, she's yours. So there's something okay about this shitshow at least."

"What does it matter if she's mine or not?"

And that, Jamie thought, was why she'd never fallen out of love with this man. And he could make pancakes like a pro – that never hurt.

The woman on the other end of the call sputtered. "It – it would mean – okay. How old is she?"

"Twenty-three months."

The twenty-three-month-old waved her pancake around, fingers digging in so tight that it ripped and fell on the ground. Steve fended off a fit of crying by plopping another pancake onto Cait's plate straight from the pan, while the dog served its function as a walking vacuum cleaner.

"Plus nine, that's thirty-two... so, five months. It took you five fucking months to knock my sister up, after she got out of four fucking months of being raped twenty-four-seven! Because they wanted to get her pregnant!"

"Becca. I'd put you on with her so she could tell you the difference, but she's" – he glanced her way and stuttered – "she's still asleep."

"Bullshit. You hesitated. Put her on."

Cait poked at her pancake, felt it hot and grinned.

"She just woke up. She's eating."

"Steve, I swear."

Jamie swallowed, held her empty plate up and exchanged it for the phone. "Most people," she said without pause, "when they find out they have a niece, they say congrats and ask for a picture. We raised you, Becca. You don't get to pull this shit with us."

Cait laid the pancake across her face and Jamie handed the phone back.

* * *

Jamie didn't have expectations, honestly. She'd had them drilled out of her. If she tried to anticipate her handlers' wants it was as likely they'd flog her for acting outside her set bounds as it was they'd assume she was acting on already-issued orders anyway.

She'd gotten good at realism, though. The chances that breeding would fail – that her next mission would include the order for maximum casualties – that Fury would cut her field time – that her long-lost family would reject her.

Sometimes she was wrong.

She heard the footsteps as she looked around the field in front of her. Steve said they grew mostly corn and kept cattle wherever the corn wasn't planted. Clean-cut stalks poked out of the ground, brittle and hard under her shoes. Olivia woofed her objections to the new person and Jamie called her back. "Don't do that," she told the dog, rubbing her ears and head before she ran off again. "This isn't ours."

"We're planting next month. Once the ground gets warmer. Unless it snows again." The woman sighed. "God, I hope it doesn't snow again."

"When do you harvest?"

"By Thanksgiving."

Jamie stood to shake –

She reeled back against the movement – good, she'd sharpened it on the drive – Steve shouldn't complain that she dipped the whetstone in his cup when –

Jamie's niece spoke quickly – "Oh I didn't – you need help up? 'Cuz you're..." – and then not at all, when she saw the knife.

"Steve said you got out of the car back here. And the dog." She shuffled her feet. "He didn't say that you were pregnant. I would've brought the Gator."

"I'm fine walking." Jamie whistled for the dog, who came bounding up with her legs caked in dirt and a giant grin across her muzzle.

The niece, name of Tabitha, chattered away walking the trail to the house: how her brother Gabriel accidentally broke his fiancée's nose, that time Sam – "she's my cousin – er, Pete's kid" – shoved three different people into the same cowpat because Risa got the farm in their dad's will instead of her, the two grandkids who got into Yale the same year independent of each other, "and boy that was a funny March Meeting – oh we call them that, it's –"

"It's better than calling it 'happy anniversary of the time someone fell off a train and bought the farm for you'. I agree."

"Actually your benefits only bought the front field."

Jamie paused, turned back to give Tabitha a look.

"Steve's got us the woods... and the back field... and the house... and the orchard."

"Should we pay the army back, then?"

"I think he already did. What was it, eight thousand dollars?"

"We already sent most of our pay home anyway."

Jamie squinted at the outline of a chimney spilling smoke through the trees. "That it?"

"Yup."

Olivia bounded ahead to sniff out the surroundings, no doubt catching Cait's baby-shampoo scent in the wind. Tabitha talked about the house, the farm, as they approached: built in the late 1890s, tossed around until the bank took possession of it, like so any others, during the Depression. Jamie's parents got it for cheap before the war had even finished, desperate to get away from Brooklyn and memories of their dead daughter.

"And it's been in the family ever since. They thought Frank would want it but he wound up selling to Pete a couple years after they died. And Pete left it with Risa."

Tabitha pushed the door open, Olivia slipped through her legs and what was, according to Steve's later observations, the whole family turned to greet Jamie all at once.

She woke up at 5AM, the unfamiliar air stirring around her as the dog chased a squirrel in her sleep at the foot of the bed. Jamie never let her on the furniture but Steve had a soft heart.

In the old family crib – she was sure she'd slept in it as a baby – Cait snored softly. If that went on Jamie wouldn't get any more sleep. This was why she'd moved the baby to a different room in the first place, dammit.

Well, no point in getting upset. According to a great-nephew – Peter was his name? She couldn't keep them all straight but she remembered this one lived in Queens, the shame – every branch of the Barnes family took turns making meals. She'd make breakfast, then.

The dog's arrival, bounding up to Jamie before she was redirected to sniffing around the scraps bucket, presaged Steve's slow walk down the stairs. He kissed her good morning and set to work on the pancakes while Jamie continued with the fruit and eggs.

A niece, Aliana, wandered down first and put on coffee. "You know we have Bisquick, right?"

"Bisquick is an abomination," Steve pronounced.

Aliana rolled her eyes and chugged her cup of joe.

The rest of the family – her family, Jamie reminded herself: her family – trickled down throughout the morning. Becca arrived and insisted her sister sit and eat, only to ask moments later, "Are these mom's pancakes?"

Jamie shook her head.

"I'm pretty sure they are."

Becca ate another forkful and Jamie told her, carefully, "Mom never made you pancakes."

Chew, water, swallow – "Yeah, I know _that_. But it's her recipe. That's why you always made it."

"Mom made _clătite_. We never had the money for that. This" – she gestured to the flat pancakes on her plate – she should probably eat them – "was cheap."

"Then why'd you say it was hers?"

"To get Pete to eat. He always... cried for Mom but he didn't remember enough to..."

The table fell into an awkward silence.

"It's just flour and eggs," Steve commented. "You had a chicken coop on the roof. 'S how you got meat once a month. Paid more for heating that thing than the apartment itself."

"Well yeah, that's where we got our meat and eggs!"

"And down for the pillows, right?" asked Tabitha.

Just like that, and they devolved into a debate about the best things to feed chickens to get fluffier feathers versus larger eggs. Steve busied himself mixing another batch of pancake batter and fetching Cait when she came trudging down the steep stairs.

Afternoon brought a walk around the fields, which Jamie opted to skip to spend time with Becca.

Of course, Becca didn't want to gossip about the neighbors.

"They shouldn't've let the complaint drop."

"They fired Director Hennessey."

"That's not good enough. If you filed your own complaint –"

[J1] "I'm not a civilian. SHIELD's complaint _is_ my complaint. The FBI didn't know I was an agent when they arrested me – for all they knew I was still rogue. The only thing they did wrong was take that long to turn me over to SHIELD."

"They starved you," Becca challenged.

"Yes."

"They tortured you."

"Becca. Love. I have killed _hundreds_ of people. I've started wars and genocides, killed presidents and – and _kids_ – and –"

Jamie cradled Cait in her arms, rested her chin on her daughter's head and watched her flip the pages of the book she pretended to read.

"They didn't know. For all that I've done, they went easy on me."

She watched her sister's emotions flicker across her face. They were the same as Steve had so often, when he'd remember all of a sudden what Jamie had done because of Hydra.

Congress certainly never forgot, or else why would they force her to live in their backyard? She comforted herself knowing that Becca, and New York, would be an easy drive from DC, but she already regretted letting Steve buy the house without seeing it herself.

"So," said one of the great-nephews, too-cheerful-like, "Boy or girl?"

"Surprise."

"What?" Aliana squawked. "How will we know which unnecessarily-gendered baby things to buy?"

Becca laughed. "If it's a boy, Risa's youngest is outgrowing his clothes faster than she can buy them."

Jamie looked at her sister, honestly confused. "If it's a boy he'll wear whatever Cait hasn't destroyed."

"Including the dresses?"

"No, she goes through those pretty quickly."

Aliana snorted her coffee through her nose and gasped, "I love you, Aunt Jamie. I really do."

Jamie buried her mouth in Cait's hair and smiled.

It was okay to be wrong, sometimes.

* * *

 _Because of course any version of Bucky Barnes will have a whetstone._


	8. Chapter 8

_Thank you for staying with me through this! References for the story can be found here: [bit.] [ly/] [2m0Yf6u]  
_

* * *

Steve got the call waiting at the bus stop. He excused himself from the parents' group conversation and answered a good twenty feet away.

"Report."

"Report."

"Rogers, Steven. Report to Triskelion by ten AM eastern daylight" – there was the school bus – "time, May first, two-thousand-twelve. Mission classified. Minimum mission time indefinite."

"Received," he said – "Received," repeated the robotic SHIELD autocaller repeated before hanging up– and called out, "Cait!"

His elder daughter yelled back, "What is it, da?"

"Get your brother back here. Change of plans, you're gonna spend the week with Aunt Becca."

Cait nodded and boarded the bus, reappearing moments later with Mihail. Steve cast around for a parent who could give them a ride but the only one still around was –

Dammit, not Casey. But he couldn't waste any time walking back home.

"Casey!"

She turned and smiled.

"I just got called in. Can you give us a ride back to my house?"

Ride secured, just in time for Mickey to hug his father's leg and ask, "Can we go to Central Park?"

"That's up to Aunt Becca. I'm not going with you. Cait, hold Reva."

They piled into Casey's car, Reveka sitting buckled in on her sister's lap, and Steve dialed. "Hey, Tony. I need to borrow your plane. The kids are going to their aunt's in the Bronx."

"No problemo. Why?"

"I can tell you in a couple minutes. How soon can it get down here?"

"Two hours? I could just charter one of the Reagan –"

"Would they take a toddler without an escort?"

Tony sighed. "I'll fly down. With the suit. One hour. Jarvis'll text you the details."

"Thank you for fulfilling your godfather duties."

"Yeah, yeah."

Next was Becca: "Hey, I just got called in. Jamie's already out in the field" – Casey huffed, disapproving – "and I need you to take the kids."

"Oh... all right. When will they get up here?"

"Three hours. I'm sorry it's –"

"Don't worry about it," said Becca, sounding like she was worrying about it. "How long?"

"Till the end of the week. Is that –"

"If they were _my_ grandkids I'd say no. But somehow you have the nicest kids on the planet, so how could I turn you down?"

Steve laughed; it was a common theme, people asking him how he parented his children that were so calm. The secret, not that he would say it, was their mother.

"Thanks so much. Their godfather's gonna take them up, I'll give him your number and address."

"Sounds good."

He hung up and Casey asked, "Their godfather is Tony Stark?"

"Yeah." Last number – the elementary school. "Hi, this is Caitriona and Mihail Rogers' dad, Steve. We're having a family emergency, they're gonna be out for the rest of the week."

"George and I could take them."

"You don't have the clearance," Steve replied, and forced himself to add, "but thanks."

Casey liked Steve – she flirted with him at every neighborhood picnic, and he knew he was paying for this ride by letting her ogle him the whole way home. She was always quick with the offer of a ride to the bus, even though Steve long ago made clear he didn't want his kids to default to a car to get around.

She did not, though, like Jamie one bit. Most of the neighbors had accepted that Jamie didn't smile much, even learned to read her like Steve could, but Casey never stopped giving her shit for it. She was convinced that Jamie emotionally abused both husband and kids, and that just happened to be Jamie's weak spot.

They pulled up to Steve's house and he forced another "thanks" out before escaping the car.

Packing was easy: he already had a go-bag and the kids could easily pull out a few pairs of their clothes. Steve set up the dog food dispenser and called a neighbor to arrange for their kid to walk Olivia twice a day, tossed whatever the kids missed packing into a fourth bag and hustled to the airport. Two minutes later he doubled back for his shield and uniform.

"Take care of 'em," he told Tony on the tarmac. "Keep Reva from wandering around. Cait has workbooks she should do on the plane. Mickey's gonna try to doodle on the chairs, don't let him."

"I got it. I know kids."

"You don't know the first thing about kids, Tony. Listen – don't let them put anything in their mouth that isn't food, sit anywhere that isn't a seat or the floor, listen to anything with headphones loud enough that you can hear it, or watch TV the whole flight."

"And here I thought everyone said they were good kids."

"They are. But they're still kids. Reva's still potty-training so you need to make sure she goes to the bathroom at least once an hour. I forgot her diapers."

Tony shooed him away with, "The stewardesses can take care of 'em," and Steve hugged each of his children a final time. They waved from the plane windows as it took off.

Coulson met him in the Triskelion parking garage. "Professor Erica Selvig was conducting experiments on the Tesseract –"

"I told you, you should've tossed that thing back in the ocean."

"Renewable energy, Cap."

Steve turned to face the other agent. "We both know Fury's making weapons with it."

"Only if the Asgardians come back," he replied airily, left Steve in the hallway and called back, "and one of 'em just did!"

On instinct, Steve dialed Jamie's number. He had to tell her about the kids – she was still on mission, need-to-know and Steve didn't need to know apparently –

The dial buzzed twice, clicked and went to voicemail. Jamie never bothered to record her own message over the default robotic voice.

"She won't pick up," said Fury. As usual, Steve hadn't noticed her approach. "Loki got to her and Barton."

"How? There are safeguards –"

"He has a staff. Put it up against your chest, take control of your mind. Their eyes glowed blue. Obviously we didn't anticipate that."

Steve leaned heavy against the wall. Why did it have to be his wife, every time, screwed over like this? "D'you know what'll break it?"

"No. He got to Selvig too. And they took the Tesseract."

"Nicola..."

"You've made your position on the cube clear. Barnes was there to supervise Selvig's experiments because she thought she was getting somewhere." She handed him a file. "Just watch."

Steve watched: the portal, the fight, the Asgardian who deflected bullets and killed anyone he didn't have the time to turn. He left in a car with Selvig, Jamie and Clint Barton.

"The portal imploded after they took the Tesseract. We lost the entire facility, have no idea where they went."

"Romanoff?"

"Bringing in someone who can help with the Tesseract. She'll be here by tomorrow morning."

He replayed the video, focusing on the Asgardian instead of his wife. He fought differently from Thor, a staff instead of a hammer – more jumping and dodging, more Steve's style than Jamie's –

"So, we find her."

"Again."

"Again," he agreed. "And we get her out."

"Again."

Steve sighed. "Again."

"Well." Fury clapped him on the shoulder. "Third time's the charm."


End file.
